Thursday, May 6, 2010

agents and agencies and editors, oh my!

Just spent several hours researching agents and agencies and contests listed on Hope Clark's

TOTAL FundsforWriters - May 2, 2010. I think my head is spinning but it was a good opportunity to read about different agencies and their staff. It was also interesting that Hope included a couple contests for flash fiction.

I'd never heard about Flash Fiction before I read Simon Larter's blog this week and, since I wanted to enter his contest, I decided this was an opportunity to learn. Carolina Valdez Miller wrote a blog (carol-in-print.blogspot.com) in which she quoted a couple of Simon's flash fiction stories. I read them and thought, Heck, I can do that. And so I did. Don't know if I could do it again but...I did it once.
Flash fiction, for those of you who, like me, haven't heard of it, is a complete story written in 1,000 words or less. It has to have a beginning, a middle and an end, just like any other piece of fiction. I read one tonight that was complete in three sentences, each two words long. I don't know who wrote it and I'm not certain of the wording but the gist was, "For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn." What a poignant story!
I'd love to be able to do something like that. My story that I wrote for Simon's contest was under 500 words so it didn't have a lot of extra wordage but I'll bet if I looked at it a month from now I could pare it down much further. I wonder....

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That six-word story is by Hemingway, fyi. :)

Thakns for the mention, good lady!