Merridawn Duckler
NEVER READ CLEAVER’S WRITING TIPS

I taught fiction at a writing institute. During our class on publishing a student mentioned flash fiction. You should, I said, explore every possibility. I always urged them to explore every possibility, I’d be hard pressed to name another profession where the aspirants arrived with a more stringent set of self-imposed rules. Never use adjectives! Never start without a writing group. No telling. No waking dreams! Never write in first person. No one reads third person! Some of these rules are good and some are bad but the negative weight on my poor students was palpable (never use big words!) So I would say look, try everything. You’ll soon figure out on your own that if you tell and don’t show your readers will feel like bored, passive little hamsters. The student described flash fiction to the class and there I was, smiling, nodding. Encouraging. Empowering.  All the while thinking to myself: wow, that sounds horrible, I am never doing that. 

This week I published a book of flash fiction. It turns out, flash fiction suits my background as a narrative poet, my interest in perplexing aphorisms and my extreme impatience. I love reading lengthy works. George Perec’s Life, A User’s Manual, every struggle of Knausgaard, all the Russians. I re-read Moby Dick once a year. But when it comes to my own writing I’ll only go so far and that length turns out to be about the amount of words in this essay.

I think a good writing exercise is to think, as my students did, about what you would never do (in literature only, please) and do that thing. Sit down at your laptop or open a page in your journal, take a deep breath and kick all those never’s to the curb. I like using flash for this exercise because the genre tolerates very little padding. Think of it as Feldenkrais for the brain—you’re putting yourself into an uncomfortable position as a way of expanding what you are capable of doing. Writers must have strong opinions and deep-rooted stances but artists know you understand a rule best when you break it and learn your true way in unfamiliar territory.  

Merridawn Duckler is a poet and playwright from Portland, Oregon. Recently, her poetry has appeared in The Offing, Unbroken Journal, Free State Review, Crab Creek Review, Literary Orphan, Dunes Review,and others. She was runner-up in the Arizona Poetry Center Contest, judged by Farid Matuk, and a finalist at Center for Book Arts, Tupelo Press, and the Sozoplo Fiction Fellowship. Her fellowships and awards include Writers@Work, NEA, Yaddo, Squaw Valley, SLS in St. Petersburg, Russia, Southampton Writers Conference, and Wigleaf Top 50 in micro-fiction, among others. She is an editor at Narrative and the international philosophy journal Evental Aesthetics. Merridawn Duckler’s latest book, Arrangement, was published in August by Southern Most Books.

Read more from Cleaver’s Writing Tips.