What turns a DocumentZ story into a success? Actually any story? Especially a flash fiction.
There are a lot of ways to answer this topic. When it comes to DocumentZ we are speaking of a Zombie Apocalypse survival story. There are some things that need to happen because of this genre specifically. Before we get there, let's look at components of a decent flash fiction.
Flash Fiction / Pulp Fiction
Yes. You are writing a flash fiction / pulp fiction.
When you are a practiced writer, you should be able to a write a DocumentZ post in one evening, about 2 hours. Take another evening for an hour to read over and edit the post and hit the "Post" button.
Really, this is all there is to it. It is flash fiction and it is meant to be fast paced and you need to treat with a lot of energy and fun. Here some points to look for:
- Pacing - This flash fiction needs to move! You do not have time for long moments of introspection and over-detailing descriptions.
If you spent the last three paragraphs explaining how the scene looks then you are doing it wrong. You only have so much time to entertain your readers. We need to bring the picture in their minds without droning on about it for a long span of words.
The better the words chosen, the better the picture. Without using vocabulary that requires a degree in English to understand.
- Show and not Tell - Instead of spoon feeding information to the audience, make the descriptions a part of the actions.
This is a tricky thing to do and sometimes you could find yourself doing this in one part of a story but not another part.
Bad Example:
37 words. The gate was very old. It was very rusty and was difficult to open. The gate was painted green and the rust made the paint flake off in places. Jimmy found it hard to open the gate.
This is terrible. It repeats gate three times, rust/rusty twice, that it was hard to open twice and explains three things that all points to the fact that it is old. Condense this all into smaller formatting.
Better Example:
The gate was rusty and was difficult to open. It's green paint was flaking. Jimmy pushed hard to get it open.
21 words. This is a little better. We can still make it better though. See how much less words we used? That means we have more words/time to bring more stuff to the audience. Also, I said that we must show and not tell. Has the immersion improved?
Even Better Example:
Jimmy ran to the rusted gate on the side of the building. The flaking green paint crunched under his hands as he shoved hard against it with both hands.
29 words. The length of this last part has gone up, but still less that the terrible first example. Now there is motion, a sense and visual of what the character is doing. In combination, we get all the same information about that gate. We also did not tell you, it happened as part of action, it is happening right now. Lastly, there was even a sound included in these 29 words.
It is very important to engage more of the senses when writing. Most people that write fiction write almost exclusively on the VISUAL. Then SOUND is the second most common description. What about touch, smell and taste? The more we use of these, the better the picture. Later you learn to combine more than just the senses into the writing. The feeling, perspective, shock, glee, and so forth.
With time and practice we get better at these things.
Writers-edge and DocumentZ is a platform where we get to practice this. So let's focus on what we can do with our writing to make it stand out. Building a good writing habit takes time and word count.
Let's kill some zombies!
Episode 3 Prompt coming soon!
Regards, @zakludick
