Efnisyfirlit

• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Why write short?
• How we’ve organized each chapter
• Relevant readings
• Flash interviews
• Free dives
• Vignettes
• Exercises
• Prompts
• One-sentence workshops
• Getting started
• Part I An Introduction to Short-Form Creative Writing
• 1 A Long History of the Short Form
• Relevant readings
• Flash interview with Pía Barros
• Free dive
• Vignette: Urgency and the short form
• In the beginning
• A note on genre
• Flash fiction
• Prose poetry
• Flash nonfiction
• What is short-form writing?
• Two worlds collide
• Dissecting the dinosaur
• Conclusion: Stealing strategies
• Exercises
• Prompts
• One-sentence workshop
• Part II The Craft of Short-Form Creative Writing
• 2 Picture This
• Relevant readings
• Flash interview with Calvin Mills
• Free dive
• Vignette: If you hand me the right map
• Stare: Educate the eye
• Image as epiphany
• The stereoscopic image
• Not just scenery
• Conclusion: Moving images
• Exercises
• Prompts
• One-sentence workshop
• 3 Voice, Character, and Narrator
• Relevant readings
• Flash interview with Sarah Evans
• Free dive
• Vignette: Stephanie’s stamp collection
• Overview
• Hearing voices
• Dialogue basics
• Point of view
• First-person singular
• First-person plural
• Second person
• Third-person singular
• The unreliable narrator
• Authentic dialogue
• Asking questions
• Dialogue format
• Is “said” dead?
• Conventional versus unconventional format
• Multidimensional dialogue
• The psychological gesture
• The show/tell ratio
• Recognizing clichés and stereotypes
• Conclusion: What are your characters made of?
• Exercises
• Prompts
• One-sentence workshop
• 4 Moving through Time and Space
• Relevant readings
• Flash interview with Karen E. Bender
• Free dive
• Vignette: Tonight, at the Santee Drive-in Theatre
• The narrative dilemma
• Self-contained worlds
• The flexibility of time: A few illustrations
• The space-time continuum
• Endless possibilities
• Conclusion: Sneak in, slip out
• Exercises
• Prompts
• One-sentence workshop
• 5 The Microcosmic Sentence
• Relevant readings
• Flash interview with Justin Torres
• Free dive
• Vignette: Beginning and ending with a dot
• What is a sentence?
• All about relationships
• What is structure?
• A blueprint for thought
• What is syntax?
• A marriage of music and meaning
• What is style?
• Unity
• Variety
• Pattern
• Making short sentences
• Making long sentences
• Making fragments
• Conclusion: Make the sentence your own
• Exercises
• Prompts
• One-sentence workshop
• 6 How to Leap: Ah-ha Moments and Associative Logic
• Relevant readings
• Flash interview with Bryan Fry
• Free dive
• Vignette: West Coast girl goes South
• And, suddenly, I knew …..
• Context, text, and subtext
• Once upon a time
• The involuntary imagination
• The hidden parts of a story
• Entrances
• Exits
• Gestalt theory for flash
• Figurative language in a flash
• Synecdoche and metonymy
• Conclusion: Follow the path
• Exercises
• Prompts
• One-sentence workshop
• 7 Translucent Design
• Relevant readings
• Flash interview with Ada Limón
• Free dive
• Vignette: The jackalope
• The invisible workaday paragraph
• Charming snakes and snake charming
• The rule of threes
• Integrating sound patterns
• Integrating nonsound patterns
• Conclusion: Black bear against night sky
• Exercises
• Prompts
• One-sentence workshop
• 8 Beg, Borrow, and Steal
• Relevant readings
• Flash interview with Steve Coughlin
• Free dive
• Vignette: Terra incognita
• Be a hermit crab
• Forms to borrow, steal, and make your own
• ABC
• Advertisement
• Aphorism
• Autobiography/biography
• Character sketch
• Confession
• Collage
• Definition
• Dream
• Fable
• Fairytale/frame story
• Instructions
• Inventory/list
• Letter
• Vignette
• Conclusion: Extreme restriction and a note of caution
• 9 Finding the Funny
• Relevant readings
• Flash interview with Matthew Clarke
• Free dive
• Vignette: Dead frogs and rooftop dolphins
• The soul of wit
• Your funny bone
• Where to start?
• Comic treatments
• “What if”/“yes, and”
• Timing, context, structure
• The short form as trickster
• Surprise, surprise
• Conclusion: Where jokes come from
• Exercises
• Prompts
• One-sentence workshop
• 10 Misfit Pleasures
• Relevant readings
• Flash interview with Alex Carr Johnson
• Free dive
• Vignette: Talk to me (a Wunderkammer)
• A taxonomy of the strange
• Useful distortion
• Fragmentation and atomization
• Conclusion: The art of miniaturization
• Exercises
• Prompts
• One-sentence workshop
• 11 Not So Fast! Strategic Revision
• Relevant readings
• A flash conversation on revision
• Cut it down
• Ask for more
• Weigh each word
• Listen closely
• Test the limits
• Remember what’s critical
• Free dive
• Gaming the draft
• Building and shaping
• Begin with “what if?”
• Make friends with your doubts
• Exercise 1: Seeing the waterfall
• Exercise 2: Fact-check yourself
• Exercise 3: Get your hands dirty
• Exercise 4: The layers of revision
• Ten steps toward revision
• Exercise 5: Breaking and unbreaking lines of text
• Exercise 6: Exploding the text
• Exercise 7: Shaving with Occam’s Razor
• Conclusion: The Beautiful Lightning
• Part III Short-Form Creative Writing Anthology
• Cookie Monster on the Dole
• All This
• A Story Possibly Heard in Some Bar at Three in the Morning
• Be Drunken
• My Grading Scale for the Fall Semester, Composed Entirely of Samuel Beckett Quotes
• A
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F
• The Man Who Hated Us and Then Forgot
• One Long Sentence
• Thin Cities 5
• Grip
• The Cat
• Rules of Combat
• Boy at Night
• Letter to a Funeral Parlor
• For My Sister in the River
• Self-Portrait as a Chimera
• My Devils
• The Prose Poem as a Beautiful Animal
• Dust
• Time Travel
• Instruction, Final: To Brown Poets from Black Girl with Silver Leica
• A Thousand Perfect Strangers
• Dinner Party
• Poland
• Hill Street Blues
• Dumped: Seven Cautionary Tales
• Bob and Betty
• Gina and George
• Dana and David
• Linda and Liam
• Kim and Krishna
• Tom and Tilde
• Sean and Susan
• What You Are
• Memoir
• A Modern Fable
• 8 Meetings Nobody Scheduled
• Natalia
• La Jungla
• The Letter from Home
• The Quiet Machine
• Some Things about That Day
• Surplus History
• the invisible girl can be anything she wants when she doesn’t want to be invisible
• The Girl Who Likes Dogs
• The Dinosaur
• Gravity, Reduced
• On Miniatures
• Pleasant, healthy-appearing adult white female in no acute distress
• Dinosaur
• Short Lecture on Your Own Happiness
• Life Story
• go-go tarot
• Cannibals and Explorers
• An All-Purpose Product
• Consequence
• In Praise of Latin Night at the Queer Club
• Icelandic Hurricane
• The Box
• The Inventory from a Year Lived Sleeping with Bullets
• Immigrant Haibun
• Scheherazade.
• Small Meditations
• A Letter to Deb Clow
• Excerpt from “Four about Death”
• Author Bios
• Acknowledgments
• Genre Index
• Index