It’s All in the Edit - How to Mine for Subtext & Streamline a Story

Lesson 9 - Less is more.

Art by Mariam Chagelishvili (those little feet ooo)

This is lesson 9 of 12 in Jo Gatford's 'Smash Your Flash' for The Forever Workshop. Today's lesson is for paid subscribers, but Monday’s will be free so make sure to come back then!

Aaand welcome back, flashers. 

We’re almost at the ¾ stage of the course and hopefully you’ve started to gather a handful of ideas, a few drafts, or perhaps applied the techniques we’ve looked at so far to some existing works-in-progress. 

Wherever you’re at, now would be a good time to think about what happens after the first-drafting stage. 

We’ve been building up a whole lotta layers in our stories, but at some point we’re gonna need to start stripping things back, figure out what’s absolutely essential, zone in on what our stories are really about, and do a little refining. 

All the writing exercises thus far have encouraged you to explore, expand and experiment, gathering up a heap of potential details and images to help convey your narrative. Which is great — but given how short flash is, and how little space we have to work with, it’s important to become more selective about what stays and what goes. 

Throughout the process of drafting, you’ll probably find that some of your original ideas get dropped along the way as you find your story’s feet. Perhaps not all the pieces fit. Perhaps you discover a fun rhythm or repetition to play with, and it takes you in a new direction. Perhaps you try a few different structures until you land on one that works. 

It’s a process, and there’s not a definitive blueprint for how to go about it. Every flash writer (and every story) is different. Sometimes you may create an almost fully-realised first draft that requires only a little tweaking. Other times you may tinker with the same idea for weeks, months or years before lightning strikes. You may even find yourself smooshing two ideas together to find that they meld beautifully as complementing story threads… 

It really doesn’t matter how you get that first draft out, so long as it exists. And then, some might say, the real work begins. 

Because despite the fine examples we’ve read so far having vastly different structures and styles and voices, they all also have something in common. They all say exactly as much as they need to. There is nothing extraneous — no fluff, padding, unnecessary exposition or explanation or meandering tangents. They are tight and efficient. 

And that, lovely writers, is the real art of flash. 

So today we’re going to look at a couple of different methods of editing flash, focusing on subtext and streamlining. 

Or, as I like to think of it: 

What’s Hiding in the White Space?