Oh, The Class You Could Take
I don’t know if this is gauche or not, but we have to replace our main sewer line, and the quote is over $11,000, so I’d love to help writers create some new stories and try to pay off this large renovation for our 1973 home!
Scroll to the bottom for an outline of how to write/revise Flash Fiction!
Cleaning out the Closets: A Hybrid Workshop: Building Resonance from Objects and Talismans
Cost: $115
September 27-30, 2024
In this weekend workshop, we will create more physicality in our writing by digging through our own conscious closest and looking at examples from poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction to find the inspirational magic in objects, heirlooms, inheritances, MacGuffins, and talismans. According to Italo Calvino, “We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic.” In this generative workshop, you’ll find ways to imbue your stories with depth and resonance grounded in concrete, specific details. Prompts and example texts will help you discover the objects your poems, fiction ,and cnf have been missing. Millions of people watch shows like American Pickers, Antique Roadshow, and Storage Wars all because we crave the stories exemplified in rare objects. Our own identities are often rooted in the items we can’t throw away, the things we collect, and the things we’ve lost along the way. Join me in creating reality and metaphor, resonance and poignancy, well-springs of depth and diversion.
Writing Flash Fiction with Immediacy and Depth: 7 week Live Online Workshop
October 22-December 3, 12:00-2:30 PM EDT
Cost: $350
Number of students: 8
I'm excited to work with a small, dedicated group of writers on their flash fiction in a safe, inspiring, and live atmosphere!
Each class will contain time for lecture, discussion, and a live facilitated workshop. Students will receive written feedback from their peers and from workshop leader Tommy Dean.
Students will have their story (s) workshopped twice during the seven-week class.
Students will receive excellent, fresh flash fiction examples with analysis and writing prompts to keep them inspired each week.
Class breakdown:
Week1: Definitions and Inspirations, Finding the Clay, Exploring the form
Week 2: Escalations and metaphors, workshop
Week 3: POV and Character, workshop
Week 4: Settings and the Stage, workshop
Week 5: Endings, workshop
Week 6: Deep into the woods, workshop
Week 7: Re-envisioning, testing the market, workshop
To sign-up email me at thomasrdean13 (@) gmail.com or send payment via Paypal. Put class name in comments.
Mighty and Flawed: Characters That Demand Attention-Part 2 1 day Zoom generative class
Cost: Pay What You Can/Want (Suggested minimum $10)
September 17 @ 2:00-3:30 PM EDT
Join writer Tommy Dean for a all new 90 minute generative writing session focused on creating and revealing characters through their strengths and flaws in micro and flash fiction.
Character is often our vehicle for the camera, and the point of view, and it’s our job to use their actions on the stage of the story to create tension and conflict, and to build resonance and satisfaction while reading. One way to do all of this is to reveal characters through their relationships with other characters, to show their flaws an their failures as they reveal themselves to the reader.
To sign-up email me at thomasrdean13 (@) gmail.com or send payment via Paypal. Put class name in comments.
From Opening to Ending: Writing a Flash Fiction Draft, 1 session with Tommy Dean
1 session, Saturday, November 2nd, 11 -1 pm EST
online, 30 students max
$50
Enroll in this class.
Join writer Tommy Dean for a two-hour generative writing session focused on creating one full flash draft from opening to ending to everything in-between. We’ll look at model texts and use prompts for each element of a successful flash including openings, escalation, backstory, metaphor, middles, endings, and titles. Instead of 5-6 separate starts, we’ll concentrate on crafting one full story with inspiring prompts for each craft element. Come create a complete and urgent story with me and your fellow writers!
Writing Flash Fiction with Raymond Carver
Dec 1-15, 2024
Asynchronous using Canvas (free learning platform)
Cost: $140
In this 2 week asynchronous workshop, we’ll use the work of Raymond Carver to investigate how to create tone and mood in our flash and micros. The way Carver’s characters long for and fight against isolation in an alienating world. We’ll focus on how Carver balances character, setting, and conflict while deploying his famous minimalism. How can we apply his craft moves to our own writing in 2024? Let’s find out together!
Participants will receive craft analysis of six Carver stories, have the opportunity to write to six Carver-inspired prompts, and receive positive feedback from their peers and the instructor. Prompts will be launched on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for two weeks.
I can’t sign off without offering you some flash fiction writing craft!
How is It different?
1. Word count
2. Focused on a singular moment or a few moments
3. Every word counts, so it pushes language and expands through metaphor
4. Cuts out parts of typical plot format: Flash is its own form because it deviates from the short story and the novel and is often more kin to the poem/stage play. Flash challenges the typical narrative structure by threatening and often following through with cutting out or skipping steps.
5. Revels in working with the reader by using implication and inferences
6. Action, reaction, and choice have more power, more weight than summary, stated feelings, and details that are static.
7. Part of a life stands in for the entire life of the character
Openings: Catching the reader’s attention
1. Must intrigue, but also provide context and establish character and story occasion
2. Needs to create the stage of the story for the character to act in/on.
a. Flash plot and structure are more in line with stage plays than novels.
3. It creates stakes or motivation for the main character, launches us into the inciting incident/story, and skips lots of exposition or information. It makes the reader feel like they are reading for a reason, for a payoff by the end of the story.
4. Openings create velocity or forward momentum, a kind of pressure under which the character has to act, which creates the plot.
Do I need a Plot?
1. In short stories, characters are given many attempts to rise above themselves, to fail, and to fail worse, before coming to their reckoning. Flash relies on fewer opportunities, less guidance for the main character and the reader, and more depth created by figurative language and just-right details than accruement of backfill and backstory.
2. Another way to think of plot is to force characters into situations where they speak the truth, the things they wouldn’t say otherwise. Or what they wouldn’t normally do. Find the unusual for this character and let it play out.
3. Story Elements: Use as many or as few as you can get away with to contain the story, stakes, and meaning. How much exposition do you really need? Cut vigorously! Do we need a falling action or even a typical resolution?
What about backstory?
1. Each story has its own pathway, but limiting the backstory or backfill is one way to stay within the flash word limit. However, a flash without some hint of who these characters were before the story started can create a story without context, without pressure on the characters to act, and without a sense of emotional resonance and satisfaction for the reader. Without backstory, we don’t often figure out the story's why, which can leave us feeling cold toward it.
If every word counts, how do I tell a full story?
1. Look to the poets who use figurative language, especially metaphors in order for the words to have more than their surface meaning. Changing or shifting a metaphor or central image creates movement, creates depth, and can add to the unsaid part of flash. Flash risks not saying enough, rather than saying too much.
2. Using metaphor or figurative language creates depth in a story of few words. The challenge in flash is to create enough depth for the story to feel satisfying and move quickly across the page.
3. The shorter the story, the more it needs a metaphor to convey meaning and resonance, skip exposition or feeling words, allow the reader to intuit the character's feelings, and understand a moment of change. These images/metaphors can also help create structure by giving the writer something to manipulate throughout the story to show movement, time, and change.
Do I need conflict in my flash? Can it be just vibes?
1. Stakes don’t always have to be resolved, but they should be applied and challenged, and I think we need to do this more to our main characters, not to shy away from these moments of confrontation, because that’s where our main characters are revealed to us! So, while I hate confrontation in my own life, I think it’s the heartbeat of fiction, and I try to angle my protagonists toward it from the very beginning of each story I write.
2. Even in quieter stories, we expect or desire to see a character challenged in some way, to see the story either the conflict or the backstory putting pressure on them, otherwise, it’s just witnessing regularity, which is often static or boring.
How do I end this thing?
1. Has the story satisfied the build-up of the confrontation? Has the main character had enough pressure put on them to act in a way they haven’t acted in their lives before this particular story? Stories are about breaking rituals, seeing a character try to get out of trouble or get into trouble, and witnessing their choices, actions, and the fallout from these choices.
2. Have these questions been answered or implied? What will reveal the narrator’s character? What will reveal their relationship? What can be gained or lost by the main character? How does this affect now and the future?
The hardest part about writing flash fiction is giving the reader an ending that satisfies in some way, that the journey was worth the time it took to read the story, and that they leave the page having seen something of the character revealed to them.
Final Thought
1. Playing towards and away from expectation brings different kinds of pleasure to a reader, and Flash often revels in the kind of pleasure gained by reading something that breaks expectations in exciting ways.