Revision and the Flash Fiction Writer

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There is nothing more exhilarating then that first burst of creativity when a writer is possessed by the idea for a short story and the words flow with the force of a flood.  The writer can barely keep up.  This is no time to worry about grammar, spelling, clarity or anything else.  This is the time to ride the tiger.

Then the ride is over and the writer sits back and looks at the work and sees that it’s unprintable.  Don’t worry.  Now it’s time for the writer to stop being a writer and to become an editor.  It’s time for the first revision.  How a writer deals with the first revision is a matter of personality.  What is important is that the writer revises not paragraph by paragraph and not sentence by sentence; but word by word.  Each word should be judged and re-written.  Actually re-written.

Re-writing each word causes several things to possibly happen.  These thoughts will go through the writer’s mind.  Is this the right word?  Is there a better word?  Is the word in the right place in the sentence?  Is the word even necessary? 

So that, if the story is 600 words long the writer will be forced to make 600 individual decisions.  It’s like working on the cellular level of the story.  This is the first revision.  Several other revisions will follow.

At this cellular level of revision, the writer will be able to do something that many less committed writers are unaware of.  The story will not only come under the writer’s conscious control but will also begin to yield to the writer’s subconscious control.  The concrete specific details of the story will begin to tell an abstract universal story that reaches far beyond the writer and the words on the page.  The subconscious of the writer will connect with the universal subconscious of the human species.

The writer, with hard work and with luck will begin speaking to the ages.  This is what the flash fiction writer can accomplish with revision, revision and more revision.