Ficly - Fiction a Kilobyte at a Time

photo by exlibris on flickr

Ficly is the reincarnation of Ficlets, a writing group that had its origins on AOL. Members write fiction whose length must be no shorter than 60 characters and no longer than 1024 characters.

That's characters, not words. Ficlys can be poetry or prose; the length is the only requirement. Ficlys tend to be tighly organised, highly focused pieces with a bit of a punch at the end. At least, my favourites exhibit those characteristics. Take "Random Walk", for example, the thoughts of a mathematician as his home is assaulted by the walking dead. I don't know about you, but math is about the last thing I expect in a zombie story. "Random Walk" is clever; it's foreboding, yet has a touch of humour that kept me from shivering at the prospect of a slowly-forming pile of zombie parts outside the narrator's house, providing the necessary pathway for them to reach him.

I hope to use Ficly as a place to stretch my short fiction and poetry muscles. As I've mentioned, I find the shortest forms the most challenging and also the most rewarding. I can write poetry, generally without a fantastic amount of difficulty, and I've written it on demand before. Yet very short prose is more difficult. The questions of how to build a piece that indicates character, plot, setting, all in 1024 characters. The scope is very narrow. "Random Walk" doesn't delve into the psyche of the narrator, nor the history of the town or how some of the zombies outside might well be his childhood friend or his (formerly) kindly old neighbour. The focus is on the zombie pile and the equations which tell the narrator how long he has left.

Will he find a way to escape? How did this zombie thing start, anyway? The author of "Random Walk" hasn't written those things, at least not yet. But you could. Joining Ficly is free and utilises a signup process that I haven't seen elsewhere on the net: you can't create a new Ficly ID on the site, but you can sign in using your Google, Yahoo, Facebook, or OpenID accounts. And Ficly members can create prequels and sequels to any story they find on the site.

Ficly is a great place to drop in over lunch and bang out a little bit of something creative, or read some of the same. Go have a look. The stories are short, but that just makes it easier to read more of them. Pace yourself. Ficly's been around in its current form for about a year and in that time its members have written a lot of stuff. The bite-sized stories may end up filling your belly faster than you'd anticipated.

In Which I Tangle With A Short Story

I decided to sit down and get to work on my short story, temporarily called 'Prediction'. I pulled up the file I'd been working on last week, only to discover it wasn't the story, but my notes on the story. I poked around in my storage locations, ran a search, and came up with about half the story. I found a file that ended in the middle of a word. Fortunately, I had printed out the page I'd completed last week, but I had printed it before I'd made the last change, so the entire second half of the page is outdated. And the new stuff is nowhere to be found. I remember the gist of it, of course. But having the file go missing is not something that fills me with confidence. Lesson here, kids: just as in computer games, the rule is: Save Early, Save Often. Le sigh.

This is the first short story I've attempted in some time. I'm going at it with the clear idea that it is a short story and therefore must be tight, specific, and precisely aimed. And I'm floundering. I'm also finding myself attempting to revise my story as I'm writing it. I'm trying not to, but my habit is to spread out, to go on about things and explore people and places at length. I could do so and then trim off the excess later, but I fear running into something I like too much to cut. For cutting is a painful and abhorrent process, as I'm discovering with my novel editing (which I've been conveniently avoiding recently).

I have the story all planned out, beginning to end. It's a solid story idea, I feel, but the devil's in the details. I'm finding myself wanting to really bring the setting to life, to make the reader feel like s/he's there. But this is a short story. I don't know how much room I have. There's a lot of debate about the length of a short story. A maximum length of anywhere from 7,500 to 20,000 words is Wikipedia's advice, though if I'm looking to publish I'd be far wiser to worry about what my market's definition is.

I'm not going to go into markets right now. There are far too many, and anyway, I've got to have a story, preferably a salable one, before I need worry about where to sell it.

The only answer I have right now is the obvious one: Write. Even if I end up tangling myself up, I'll have written something from which I can hope to carve a sleek story in the coming weeks.

Art Brain Confession

Time for me to 'fess up: I'm supposed to be composing more awesome bloggage for you folks, but... I watched willowing's vid that I put up here yesterday, and then another one (my favourite and very first willowing video I ever saw, "Treat Yourself Like You Treat Your Best Friend"), and I think I might be doing art today instead of writing. Hm. I've started prepping two sheets of watercolour paper (forgetting until just now that I should be taping them down and not using rubber bands, duh, so they don't dry buckled), and... well, I have watercolour crayons and Inktense pencils and all kinds of good stuff.

So, er, yeah. Not much going on in my writing brain right now. I got that one short story started earlier in the week, but I find myself editing as I write to keep the thing tight and keep out unimportant details, and I could, and probably should, be doing that type of work after the story's finished.

When Art Muse attacks, she does not take 'I should be writing!' for an answer.