Comparing 4 drafts of my flash story

My flash story, “What I Find in My Mother’s House After She Dies,” was published (!) in Milk Candy Review this week, and I wanted to reflect a little bit on the writing process.  

Inspiration and drafting

One of my favorite family possessions is a small, book-shaped locket that opens to reveal portraits of my grandparents when they were newly married. I love this locket; it reminds me of my own history, my family; its presence brings me comfort. I decided to write a story from the opposite premise—what if you’d found this locket and there was no family history in it? If everything in your family’s “archive” actively resisted your attempts to know it? (This is also a theme I explored in my zine, “Writing is a Kitchen.”)

I wrote a draft, revised it once, and then sent the story to SmokeLong Quarterly. For $25, the SmokeLong editors will provide feedback on your submission. I revised the story based on the feedback, and then did another pass purely focused on cutting and tightening (ultimately cutting 50 words, which in a 400 word piece, is a lot).

Draft by draft analysis

I made this site to compare my drafts side-by-side.

This comparison showed me that the story got stronger by developing a complete character arc.

• The first draft proceeds on the rails of my original concept: telling a story through a list of objects. The conceit of the story (going through boxes in someone’s house after their death) is carried through all the way to the end.
• In the second draft, I moved away from the list by expanding the role of the brother. In the process, I cut too much of the connective tissue holding the brother’s story and the list of the mother’s objects together, feedback the SmokeLong Quarterly editors raised.

• The third draft makes the relationship between these two parts clearer by having the respective characters interact. (This makes it sound like I knew exactly what I was doing at the time; I didn’t.) Now, the mother interacts with the brother (via his letters) much sooner. When I look at the pink highlighted sections of the draft, I can see how this choice set up an arc for her.

• And the published story is a leaner version of the above. I broke the object list up into separate paragraphs, to aerate the introduction, and included a sentence-long flash forward at the end to create a sense of significance.

What I’ve learned

In one of my favorite craft essays, the sci-fi writer Arkady Martine posits that every writer gets “one free trick,” one craft element that comes to you naturally, and that you can use as ballast while you practice the elements that don’t come naturally.

Flash fiction serves up a whole buffet of elements that don’t come naturally to me  The compression! The pace! The endless formal flexibility, alongside line-by-line rigor, where every sentence has to work on five levels at once. (Novels, by contrast, have a lot of sentences; it’s okay if some of them only work on one level.) Right now, I’m drafting a flash piece, told in the form of emails to a property management company, and I find myself getting flippant with it, so amused by playing with form that the amusement ends up being all there is.

When I sense my stories are going off track, especially flash pieces, I can go back to character to identify and fix the problem. Not only did this story get stronger overall with the addition of a character arc, but many of the other elements of flash fiction clicked into place. With a clear focal character, I could clearly guide the reader through the story’s multiple timelines, and ensure that the imagery provided both emotional weight and forward motion.

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