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Sunday, August 3, 2014

EDITOR INTERVIEW: Dino Laserbeam of Freeze Frame Fiction Discusses Publishing and the Art of Flash Fiction

Flash Fiction - if you don't know what that is, I'll tell you: to the reader, flash fiction is a short-short story that can be read in under five minutes. Not just a scene, but an entire self-contained story, complete with beginning, middle, and end. The brevity forces authors to be so economical that the result is often something close to poetry.

But writers, or at least this writer, see flash a bit differently: to us, it's a unique form of storytelling that writers invented to torture themselves. Apparently we thought writing a good story at length was too easy, so we decided to find ways to cram it all into 1,000 words or less. It can be . . . trying. I recently posted my own attempt.


With that said, I enjoy writing flash. It's a game. How can I manipulate words to make them say more? And reading it is even better. Which is why I asked Dino Laserbeam, editor-in-chief of Freeze Frame Fiction, to answer a few questions.


Freeze Frame is a semi-pro publisher specializing in "any genre, no content restriction - just good flash fiction."


I like these guys because they put out quality fiction. And they do it for free. Their first issue can be read online here, or, for those on the go, an ebook will soon be available through Amazon. I was personally pleased to see some names I'm familiar with - Alex Shvartsman and Stewart C. Baker - both terrific writers - alongside some new talent to discover.


The second issue is in the works, so if you're feeling inspired, they're accepting submissions for it until September 15th.

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Writing a good story of any length is difficult, yet flash fiction challenges writers to do just that . . . in under a thousand words. Why do writers torture themselves by trying to pack so much into so little?

Because writers are naturally masochists! More seriously, it’s because of the challenge. Writing a novel is hard because it involves a lot of words, a lot of time, and a lot of planning (or re-structuring); a writer has to maintain a certain story and pace for tens of thousands of words or more. Flash fiction is difficult for the opposite reason: the writer still has to give us story elements, defined characters, and enough to keep us reading, but he only has 1,000 words to make his point. Could you do that? Don’t you want to find out?