I’m following up last week’s post on how to write short stories with an interview with Laura Pearlman, a professionally published speculative fiction author and all-around mad genius. But you don’t have to take my word for it…
Laura Pearlman’s fiction has appeared in Nature, Shimmer, Flash Fiction Online, and a handful of other places. Her LOLcat captions have appeared on McSweeney’s. She’s a former associate editor at Escape Pod and editor of the almost entirely hypothetical CatsCast podcast. You can find her online at @laurasbadideas on Twitter
If you haven’t read Laura’s fiction, you’re in for a treat. Her visions are unique and often hilarious, making it pretty easy to pick out a “Laura story” even if you don’t spot the byline. To be honest, she’s also a whizz at titles, as you can see from “So, One of Those Tiny Alien Spaceships Has Flown Into Your House. Now What?” (Nature, 2018) and “The Shadow Over My Dorm Room” from 2018’s Cackle of Cthulhu anthology.
Perhaps my favourite piece of fiction from Laura, though, is “I am Graalnak of the Vroon Empire, Destroyer of Galaxies, Supreme Overlord of the Planet Earth. Ask Me Anything,” (Flash Fiction Online, 2015). So I was thrilled when Laura agreed to let me interview her about the story (which I’m going to just call “Graalnak”) and her writing process for this blog post!
You don’t have to read the story to enjoy this interview (Laura’s just that good), but I highly recommend it. Not only will it help you figure out how the insights she shares can be applied to writing a story, it’s just such a fun piece of flash.
Interview
Stewart: Graalnak is one of my favourite pieces of humorous flash fiction. It’s got personality in spades (no doubt because spades are important for harvesting radishes), has multiple running gags, effectively mimics a real-life form of communication, and–even more impressively–it does all that while telling an actual story. Which part of the story came to you first, and how did you manage to keep all of those moving parts coherent in under 1000 words?
Laura: At some point, I noticed that the same “I am [name], [verb]-er of [noun]” structure showed up in Reddit AMA titles and Game of Thrones dialogue, and I knew I had to do something with that.
I made the jump to an alien overlord AMA pretty quickly. I had to make a few adjustments — my original concept was that the Vroon were grinding up humans for radish fertilizer, which, it turns out, isn’t funny — but it mostly flowed pretty smoothly from there.
The hardest part was the ending. I knew I wanted Graalnak to leave Earth. I eventually decided he should be tricked into searching for better radishes elsewhere, but my initial thought was that this would require a vast, complicated conspiracy. I couldn’t come up with a good way to convey this without breaking the format, though, so I scaled it down to the current ending.
As to keeping it all to 1000 words — one nice thing about this format is that there’s no need to spend any words on descriptions of characters, settings, or movement.
Stewart: Humans being ground up for fertilizer definitely would have been a very different story! It’s interesting how you jumped from AMA/GOT to alien overlords to uh… less murdery humour. Could you talk a little bit about your usual process for writing flash, and whether you stuck to that with Graalnak or not?
Laura: Graalnak was probably the easiest story I’ve ever written, because I had a strong sense of what it was going to be before I started writing. The details changed along the way, but it was always going to be about an evil alien overlord with an overbearing personality who eventually left Earth.
Most of the time, though, I don’t start out with a solid sense of what a story will be, so I tend to flail a lot. For flash, I might decide on a format (e.g., a Reddit thread), and I’ll write and rewrite the first paragraph until I have a good feel for the main character and voice. Then I’ll struggle to find a plot. At some point, I’ll wonder whether I’ve completely lost my ability to write. Eventually, I’ll either abandon the story or produce a terrible first draft.
Then comes the part I actually enjoy: iterating over that draft, finding threads (themes, running gags, character traits, voice, aspects of the world, etc.) and strengthening them, cutting away excess clutter, changing the ending, sometimes switching to a completely different format — basically, transforming that first draft into something I can read without cringing, then to something that’s maybe sort of okay, and then to something that’s actually pretty good, if I do say so myself.
Stewart: It’s definitely a great feeling to move from a cringey first draft to something that meets your standards! You’ve written flash and longer fiction. Do you think there are any noticeable differences between writing each form? Any tips for people trying their hand at flash fiction for the first time?
Regardless of what form you’re writing in, make sure there’s an actual story behind it.
Laura Pearlman
Laura: My goals are different for flash and for longer stories. When I’m writing a longer story, my goal is usually to more-or-less directly relate the events of the story. When I’m writing flash, I typically think about what events are happening in the story and then create an artifact (a reddit thread, one side of an email conversation, a public service announcement) that reflects those events indirectly, leaving it up to the reader to infer what’s going on. Just to be clear, I’m not saying all flash should be like that! Lots of excellent flash stories use a straight narrative structure to communicate clearly and directly; it’s just that none of those stories were written by me.
So here’s my advice:
- Regardless of what form you’re writing in (straight narrative, epistolary, a series of yelp reviews), make sure there’s an actual story behind it.
- Trust your readers. They’re probably better at picking up inferences than you think.
- Of course it’s always good to show your story to someone else and get their opinion. But don’t think you need every reader to understand everything about the story — that’s an impossible goal, at least without overexplaining things to death.
- Ignore this if it doesn’t work for you. There’s lots of writing advice that’s good for some people and bad for others.
Stewart: Excellent advice! Incidentally, have you noticed how “advice” and “radish” have almost all the same letters? Okay, maybe they don’t. But what’s the deal with the radishes in Graalnak? (I notice they’re also in the header image on your website.)
Laura: For the story, I chose them more or less randomly — I wanted something consumable that most people don’t have strong positive or negative feelings about (I don’t think the story would have been nearly as funny if Graalnak had been obsessed with bacon or kale).
Radishes started invading my real life around the time the story was published. My interviewer at Flash Fiction Online told me she grows radishes in her garden. Right after the story came out, my sister said she’d seen radishes at the farmer’s market had bought some because of me. Over the next few weeks, friends started telling me things like “there were radishes in my salad at lunch, and I thought of you.”
So radishes are my thing now. Also, they’re pretty.
Stewart: To be fair, radishes are delicious. I’ve always identified with Graalnak on a deep, primal level for… Okay, I can’t say that with a straight face, either. Anyway, thanks for letting me pick your brain about this story and writing flash fiction in general! Do you have any other stories you’ve written that you’d like to share with people, or any exciting news?
Laura: No exciting news, but you can find links to all my published stories on my website.
Stewart: Thanks again for stopping by!
Closing Thoughts
That’s pretty much it for this post!
You can read and analyze Graalnak, if you want to see what makes a great flash story tick. Otherwise, just keep writing with an eye to your goals and schedule, and take a breather if you’re feeling burnt out. Self-care is an important part of any hobby or career!
Next week, I’ll cover writers block and some methods for tackling it.