“A day of fun,” my father had said, but that Sunday only involved walking from one place downtown that was closed to another. He bought white sheets for my bed at the only store open. This wasn’t long after…
One of my favorite flexes of flash fiction is the freedom to veer offroad into haunting, peculiar places that seem similar to what we know, but not. Spaces that lure us in, places we think we recognize, but proportion and framework are off, though not enough to be alarming. Yet somehow these otherworlds still feel emotionally true. Often, these are liminal spaces where everyone is a guest on a longer journey. As a writer, that’s where I want to go. I keep a Post-it note near my computer that says, Find the Weird.
In my first drafts, I’m looking for raw energy in the text, and I can only achieve that when I stop thinking and allow myself to play. That process, which requires me to release control, drags me to places I’d never go in real life. This improvisational writing has a rolling-down-a-hill feeling that I try to keep up with while staying out of the way. This magic, for me, is created with the improv draft. I can’t Frankenstein flat writing alive through revision.
In Rick Rubin’s book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, he says, “In play, there are no stakes. No boundaries. No right and wrong. No quotas for productivity. It’s an uninhabited state where your spirit can run free.”
One way I trick my overcontrolling, brain into leaving me alone during the first draft is by writing to photographs, immersing myself in images and climbing inside to become the main character. I may use the mood of the photo, the setting, the characters, or only one element—whatever comes to me without second-guessing for as long as I can sustain myself on that one breath, like a scramble to get it all down before fog obscures it. Only then do I look at the next photo. I used three photographs to inform the direction of this story—one to get me started, one in the middle, and one that hinted at the ending. The key to this process is to be surprised by each photo and go without question. Go without knowing where I’m heading. Go fast enough to outrun the voice in my head that demands perfection.
Rubin says, “Take art seriously without going about it in a serious way,” and, “Feel free to experiment. Make messes. Embrace randomness.”
That’s difficult for me because I want everything neat and orderly, like a good color-coded spreadsheet. But that’s not how art works. I learned through practice to give up control and write through the chaos, and I found a freedom that still surprises me. Writing from photographs gives me a guide to hang onto as I descend into messy and weird.
Images are only one source of stability in this process. I also draw inspiration from snippets of dreams, strange news headlines, random bits of overheard dialogue, my past, and my own way of seeing the world, but no matter the initial idea, I’m still looking to find the weird.
JULIA STRAYER’s stories are living their best lives in Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review Online, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Jellyfish Review, HAD, Flash Frog, Atticus Review, and others. Her work has won contests and awards and is included in The Wigleaf Top 50 and The Best Small Fictions. She’s a Submissions Editor at SmokeLong Quarterly and teaches creative writing at New York University. She can be found on Facebook @juliastrayer.9 and Instagram @juliastrayer.
