916. Grant Faulkner, author of "The Art of Brevity" and executive director of NaNoWriMo talks with us about how writing very short stories can improve all your writing.
916. Grant Faulkner, author of "The Art of Brevity" and executive director of NaNoWriMo talks with us about how writing very short stories can improve all your writing. (And whether it's worth it to get an MFA these days.)
| Transcript: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/grant-faulkner/transcript
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Mignon:
Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty. And today we have a special guest for the Grammar Girl podcast. We have Grant Faulkner, the executive director of National Novel Writing Month, and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. He recently published "The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story." He's also published "Fissures, a collection of 100-word stories," the short story collection, "All the Comfort Sin Can Provide," "Nothing Short of: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story." "Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo." And he is here today to talk with us about the "Art of Brevity," his newest book. Welcome, Grant.
Grant:
Thank you so much, Mignon. It's a treat to be here with you. Yeah, yeah. Where is my copy? I, oh, here it is. Here it is. You have the arc there. I like that part. Yeah.
Mignon:
We're both holding up our copies of the "Art of Brevity," sort of mirror images there. How fun. Well, it's a wonderful little book. I, not surprisingly ... I love that the chapters are all really short, and the book is about brevity, so that's, you know, a whole circle fullness kind of thing.
Grant:
Yeah, I've heard a lot of jokes about going on at length about brevity, which I can do, and I'll do here on the podcast today. But, yeah, I also joke that I think the book would be better if it was about 10,000 words shorter. So there's always ... brevity's always an aspiration, put it that way.
Mignon:
Or if you wanted to go for irony, it could be much longer.
Grant:
Mignon:
That's hilarious. So I solicited some questions from people on social media, and I think we have a really, one good one to get us started. All right. From Katie Walker who asked "What elements are essential to make a very short story?"
Grant:
That is such a good question. And essentially I spent the whole book trying to answer that. But, you know, I think one way to think about it ... let me think if I can think through metaphors. Like when you're writing a novel, you really have limitless land to use for your novel. You literally can write a 10,000-page novel if you really want to, you know, it's like, I always compare a novel to a southwestern city, you know, developers in a southwestern city, they can just spread and spread and spread, and the city can grow and grow and grow. There can be, you know, essentially no boundaries. But in a short story, they're very tight boundaries. And so you really have to be careful with each word choice, each sentence. You have to really communicate the story, I think, through suggestions and hints and really kind of paint your characters with very deft brushstrokes.
Grant:
So it's not like you're gonna go into a whole big long character background. And in fact, sometimes with flash stories you know almost nothing about the character, or it's communicated just through their dialogue and the situation, perhaps. So you rely a lot more on the reader to fill in the gaps. And I think "gaps" is the key word here, is that you're writing, you're not just writing with the text on the page. Like a novel is largely about the text on the page and making connections and building explanations and building this world. But with flash fiction, because it's so brief, you need to think about how you're building the world without the text. You know, how what you leave out, kind of speaks through the story. And I think that's the real art in a way. It's hard to explain how to do that. But I try in the book.
Mignon:
Yeah, I wanna talk a little bit more about constraints because that part really resonated with me. I'm the kind of person who gets overwhelmed in the salad dressing aisle, you know, cause there are just too many choices. And to turn in anything written, I have to have a deadline. And that's a kind of constraint.
Mignon:
Mm-hmm.
Mignon:
Well, and actually, let's back up just a tiny bit. I feel I jumped in too fast. So can you define, actually, what do you mean by a very short story?
Grant:
That's a really good question about constraints
Grant:
Mignon:
Do you ever do the same story in all those forms? Have you ever started with a thousand and tried to narrow it down to six?
Grant:
That is such a good exercise. What I've given people ... the exercise to trim it in half, you know, to write a 500-word story and then a 250-word story and then 100-word story. But I've never done all of them like that. I love that idea though.
Mignon:
That would be fun. Like, yeah. Well that remind what that makes me think of, one thing you said in the book is that this is being taught more in schools. That would be a great assignment. How did you learn that it was being done in schools and, you know, is it being used in creative writing classes or just general English classes in general? Do you know more about how it's being used?
Grant:
I think all the above. When we started 100 Word Story, I had no idea that it would be taught in schools. But we kept hearing from teachers and kept hearing from teachers who would be teaching in prisons or teaching GED classes or teaching immigrants. And it's a very accessible form. And that's what I, you know, that's what I hear from teachers. And of course it is just in terms of length, it's also like what I've heard. And there is a teacher who's actually, um, publishing a book with Houghton Mifflin on teaching 100-word stories that's coming out soon. But she says that she can put like a whole story up on a projector, and you can read it together in class and the teacher can go over each element of the story. And, so it's like really easier for students to kind of comprehend all the story elements with that one snapshot of a story.
Grant:
So I think that's one reason for its popularity. A lot of people are saying it's about the internet.
Grant:
Mm-hmm.
Grant:
And I think the internet is a factor. I mean, when I started 100 Word Story, the journal, back in 2011, I felt like we are maybe late to the game back then. And I think we are one of 20 or 30 flash fiction sites on the internet. And now I think they're 200 or 300 or 2,000 or 3,000. I can't keep track. They're everywhere. And so there is like a real popularity for the form that's emerging. And I find just anecdotally that a lot of younger people under 30 are very attracted by it.
Mignon:
Yeah. Well, you know, I love the idea. You also called them postcard stories.
Mignon:
Mm-hmm.
Mignon:
And I love the idea of hand writing it on a postcard and then mailing it to someone or something like that.
Grant:
Absolutely. It's funny you mentioned that because I have my book launch party tonight, and one of the exercises I'm gonna have for attendees, I bought all these vintage postcards, and I'm gonna hand them out to everybody. And so the postcard itself is a story prompt, and I want them to write a story on the back of it, and they can only use the back to tell the story. So yeah. It's and, so like with the internet, I think these stories do fit very neatly into all the little boxes on the internet. You know, you can publish a whole story on Facebook or Twitter, so, right. Yeah,
Mignon:
Yeah. Well, let's go back for a minute to the idea of constraints and how they fuel creativity. Can you talk more about that?
Grant:
Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? It's counterintuitive because usually we hear the word "constraint" and we have negative connotations with that. And you mentioned one constraint, the deadline, and of course, at NaNoWriMo we're big believers in the goal and the deadline, that type of constraint. I think the constraint, and for me, I'll just speak through the lens of a 100 Word Stories because it's easier for me to make that...the point with this is that, you know, it's, so, there's nothing better about a story when it's 100 words. You know, it could be 99 words, it could be 101 words. But it's interesting to me, because when I first writing them, like my initial attempts, I could not get them down to 100 words. I'd always write like 150 words. And I sent them to ... and, you know, kind of said, "Hey, I'm doing this" to the person, Paul Strohm, who I first learned about 100-word stories from.
Grant:
And I said, "Hey, I wrote up a story that was 150 words," you know, and he said, "No, no, no, you can't stop there. You have to take it down to exactly 100 words." And he said, "Trust me; it will get better." Again, 100 isn't a magic number. But what happened in that was that by really thinking about how I could pare down the story, and by thinking about how I could, um, let those gaps speak through the story, as I mentioned earlier, and really pay attention to each word. I did find a better story in the end, and it was because of my intensity of just paying attention to everything in the story. So the constraint kind of honed my attention both to the world in general because now I kind of look for stories in the nooks and crannies of life as I put it.
Grant:
So my own kind of storytelling aesthetic has changed because I think a lot of the smaller stories in our lives. They're just as significant as the bigger stories, but sometimes they don't have a place, you know, you can, you can write a, a novel or a memoir with a you know, traditional narrative arc that's really big and kind of builds an escalation of things. But sometimes it leaves out all these like, tiny moments that are very telling and very important and very dramatic. And so I think it helps me find different stories. And then I pay attention to the construction of that story in a different way. I'll offer one, can I offer one more metaphor?
Grant:
Yes.
Grant:
It's kind of like Rubik's cube. You know how with the Rubik's cube, at least I still do this cause I never really learned how to do it. But you, you keep shuffling the colors to try to get them all to match. And so if you get all of them to match red on one side, most likely the other sides are not matched. And so when you're writing a 100-word story, it's like that: you're constantly kind of turning phrases back and forth. You know, you might add 10 words here and then pare down by seven words and then add five words and then pair down by three. You know, you're kind of constantly putting new elements in play.
Mignon:
Mm-hmm.
Grant:
Yeah, I think, again, like ellipses marks something that's been omitted, right? And it's an element of punctuation that allows us to like visibly see something's been omitted. But that speaks to what I was talking about earlier with the gaps in the stories. Like, so much about how you're constructing a story is through what's been omitted. And there's a famous Hemingway rule of writing where he said that to write a good short story, it's like an iceberg. An iceberg. Like only 10% of it is above the surface. And so 90% of it, the reader doesn't see, but the author does have a feeling for that other 90%. So it speaks through what's been omitted or it speaks through the 10%. And so I think, you know, ellipses is a good metaphor for how to think about writing these.
Grant:
I loved it. And I can't quote direct
Mignon:
Mm-hmm.
Grant:
And I'd better be involved.
Mignon:
Grant:
That's such a good question on a couple different levels. So I'll answer the first one. My experience with NaNoWriMo preceded 100 Word Stories, but just by a year or two, I think my first NaNoWriMo was in 2008 or 2009, and I started writing 100-word stories in 2010 and then started the literary journal 100 Word Story in 2011. And actually when I was talking with Chris Baty, the founder of NaNoWriMo, about being on the board, because I was on the board before I became executive director, and I told him about, you know, starting 100 Word Story, the journal, and I was kind of on the fence because I wasn't sure if I had enough time to do it. And he was the one who encouraged me to do it. So they really coincide in the sense of both chronology and influence in some ways. And then, but it is interesting to me because I have, like, you know, NaNoWriMo is in some ways the opposite
Mignon:
Right. That's what I was thinking!
Grant:
Grant:
You know, we're dropping little hints throughout a story. And so in a novel you're dropping a lot of hints and you're escalating the action and creating more and more tension, but you're doing so on a smaller level with the flash fiction. And so I think it's a really good way to kind of, you know, again, like the teacher told me, Kim Culbertson, you can see all the story elements in one snapshot. So it's a good way to learn those story elements. So I think my novel writing has, and also like I have a chapter in the book about writing in a kind of fragmentary style. Which for me is it's my form of poetry. Like I'm kind of a frustrated poet, and I turn to flash fiction to be a poet, but through prose, not through actual poems. And I think that's made me a more kind of poetic novelist as well.
Mignon:
Mm-hmm.
Grant:
Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting to think what we really know about anybody in our lives too. We have
Mignon:
Yeah. Well, you were talking about those little boxes online that we all write in. And I know, like, I have definitely noticed that the constraints of those in my, I guess you'd call it non-fiction writing—writing social media posts—that my writing does become better when I write something that's too long and then I have to edit it down to fit in that darn box
Grant:
You know, every kind of writing has its own aesthetic or purpose, you know? And so I don't make a demarcation between fiction and nonfiction. I think I mean brevity, I view it all as like what I was saying earlier, you know, you learn as a writer so much from writing a poem. You can learn so much by writing a mystery. You can learn so much by writing a literary fiction novel. You can learn so much by writing flash fiction. So I think that experience of all different genres teaches you different things. And in non-fiction there's certainly like moments for really brief, you know, essays or articles or just pieces. I mean, as you said, you know, our idea of nonfiction storytelling really has changed because of social media, because we're all putting our stories into little boxes.
Grant:
And some people are really great at doing that, right? Like, some people have mastered the form of social media, it's like a genre unto themselves. And part of that is their ability to be brief, you know, or to tell that story in just a small space. Um, so yeah, I think in some ways, you know, I wish there was a way to do an analysis of kind of post-internet writing and pre-internet writing to see if that kind of enforced brevity has made us better writers. I like to think that it has made us better writers. I think Twitter is a fascinating challenge, especially when it was 140 characters. Now we have like, what, 250 characters? We can just go hog wild
Mignon:
I think they just upped it to 4000. Who knows, it changes every day.
Grant:
Mignon:
Product review. That's fun. Oh, how fun. Yeah. One other thing I really liked about the book is that you had exercises at the end of each chapter. They aren't like, I don't know, they aren't tests. They're just fun little exercises. Do you wanna give an example of one so people can get a feel?
Grant:
Yeah, gosh. Um, there was the one where I, where I do have the challenge to, to write like a 500-word story and then to keep cutting it in half and kind of compare compare different versions. I'm going to just open it up randomly, how about that?
Grant:
Sure.
Grant:
So I'll mention this one. When I was getting my graduate degree in writing, my MFA, I took this class and Bob Gluck, the professor, he challenged us to write a novel in one page. So again, this will speak to the novel writing and the flash fiction. And at the time I was like, how do you do that? And he said, it's not, you're not summarizing a novel. You're not saying this happened, then that happened. You're trying to capture the essence of a novel in a single page. And so in doing that, like what I ended up doing is I was reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's notebooks, which are amazing to read.
Grant:
And basically in his notebooks, he categorized all of his thoughts into different little buckets, you know, and I took some of the favorite phrases, um, and created these two characters. And my ... the challenge was, is to give the feeling of a grand sweep of a big novel in a single page. And that is possible, you know, you can do it. And so it was a really interesting exercise in being able to envision a novel while enacting it very briefly. And so there's an exercise like that in the book, like write a novel in a single page. And I think it's like this search for the essence of a story that's really meaningful in writing flash fiction. I mentioned how the Japanese author, Yasunari Kawabata, he wrote this wonderful novel "Snow Country," and he won the Nobel Prize for it. And soon, right before his death, he wrote a ... he somehow, I don't know what he was thinking, but he, the novel wasn't right. And so he tried to capture the essence of it, and he wrote a 12-page story called "The Gleanings of Snow Country." And so it's in the gleanings in the essence, you know, where he found the meaning. And I think that that was so interesting. And so that's like, I think that, you know, you could, listeners, if they have like a 10-page or 20-page story, you might think about doing that. How could you make that story into one page? Or how would you write a one page novel?
Mignon:
I'm wondering if that's ... I'm imagining it's different from what you would write to market a novel. You know, when you publish a novel, you have to write a marketing summary that entices people to read it. Yeah. And I think that would probably be different from capturing the essence of the whole thing. Or do you disagree?
Grant:
I think it would generally be different because I think the marketing summary is more of "this happened; then, that happened." I mean, it's a little bit about trying to capture that mysterious essence of a novel. So there's something to it. It's not just a summary. But I do think that the initial exercise that I got was something different, you know?
Grant:
Mm-hmm.
Grant:
So my kind of collage like approach, at least for me, it fulfilled the assignment better than a summary.
Mignon:
Yeah. It might be a useful exercise to get you to a good summary, but you probably wouldn't use it as the summary.
Grant:
Yeah, exactly. I think it should stand alone. It shouldn't be like a teaser for buying a book.
Mignon:
Yeah. And this is just kind of a random thing that popped into my head. When you mentioned earlier that you got your MFA, and I know a lot of people think about going to grad school, like, would you do it again? Would you get an MFA again if you had to make the choice?
Mignon:
That's such a tough question. I mean, I enjoyed getting my MFA, I enjoyed the classes, I enjoyed the community. I enjoyed what I learned. But you know, I went in such a different time, and it was actually really cheap then. Weird to say, but I went to San Francisco State and back then, this was in the early nineties, uh, especially compared to what it costs today. I don't know what San Francisco costs, but I know just in general, tuition is so high. And so I think it's such a personal decision and so much about your finances, and I would hesitate to advise anyone to take out a lot of loans and to really carry a financial burden. And I think what's wonderful about today, like this was when I went and got my MFA, it was pre-internet.
Mignon:
So there actually was no NaNoWriMo, there was no Grammar Girl, there were none of these wonderful free ... there wasn't this infinity of YouTube videos of authors talking about their craft, or online classes. And so there's so many different ways to sort of get your MFA that are unofficial, and I think there's so many writing communities in the world that you can join for free or for minimal cost. And so I guess I would advise people to really think about, because really what it's about in the end is learning how to be a writer. Unless you really wanna be a professor of creative writing and then you should get your MFA. But if you just wanna be a writer, I think you can do that without paying like a huge tuition. So I just kind of advise people to explore other, you know, ways to learn and be a part of a community. Yeah.
Mignon:
Yeah. Thanks. That's great insight. So I have one final question from a listener. This is from Jeff Baker and he wants to know if you know what is the oldest example of flash fiction that you know of?
Grant:
You know, I don't know the answer to that question, but, well, there's Sappho who wrote, I guess, but Sappho is considered more poetic, I think. Like her fragments that she wrote, um
Grant:
mm-hmm.
Grant:
I don't know the whole Sappho story.
Mignon:
Yeah, that's good. They're quite short.
Grant:
Yeah. Yeah. So I think we actually come from, like flash fiction isn't new. I have a quote from Rebecca Makkai, a contemporary author, but she has, she puts forward the theory that in our daily lives, like if you're at a dinner party, it's very rare for somebody to tell a story that's longer than 500 words. You know, that we actually speak in these kind of like very, very short stories. And I think that's true. So, um, yeah. So I think, I think oral storytelling is generally pretty short.
Mignon:
Yeah. So we had the epic poetry, but most people thousands of years ago were probably just sitting around the campfire telling 100-words, little
Grant:
Stories, a hundred word
Mignon:
Stories.
Grant:
Yeah. They'd be like, I saw this Bear,
Mignon:
Grant:
Chase me,
Mignon:
Grant:
I fell in love along the way. I don't know.
Mignon:
There's the conflict, the the romance. Yeah, exactly. It's got everything.
Grant:
It's got the high stakes. Yeah. If you tell it right, if you tell that bear story right. It can be a good story.
Mignon:
Grant:
You know, I am Grant Faulkner basically everywhere where I am online. So Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, uh, my website, it's all Grant Faulkner. One word. Yeah. And I'm gonna just say one, one thing I thought of before this interview, Mignon, is I could have titled this book "The Grammar of Brevity."
Mignon:
Yeah. You could have, yes. Because grammar is sort of a metaphor for all those things too.
Grant:
Exactly, exactly.
Mignon:
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for being here today. I just highly recommend your book again, "The Art of Brevity." You can get it where all fine books are sold and also, you know, I have to give a little plug for NaNoWriMo too because it's ... I love NaNoWriMo as well. And so, um, if you're interested in writing a novel instead of a 100-word story, also check out nanowrimo.org. Correct.
Grant:
Yeah. Thank you so much, Mignon. We are lovers of Grammar Girl, and in fact, I want everybody to know that you're on our writer's board, so we appreciate your support in
Mignon:
I am, I should have disclosed that at the beginning actually, disclosure, disclosure, disclosure. But it's not a paid position, so I'm fine.
Grant:
That's right.
Mignon:
We're fellow supporters because I love the organization. Yeah. Well ,great. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.