A fun and eminently useful literary treasure map.
University of Colorado, Boulder, lecturer Stohlman offers tutelage on creating, revising, and collecting the shortest of short stories in this craft book.
This book begins by defining the genre, differentiating “flash”—stories under 1,000 words in length—from prose poetry and emphasizing the strength of brevity: “sometimes the more you know about something, the less you like it.” Stohlman shares important tips from the outset, urging readers to focus on brief portions of larger narratives—to “ ‘drop’ us into that little slice of story.” From there, she describes how to imply events, write strong dialogue, and work with word constraints and prompts (and around clichés). Importantly, she spends a lot of time debunking myths about flash, including false notions that shorter stories are easier to write than long ones and that when you submit a story for publication, an editor wants you to fail. It’s not about pleasing an editor, she writes: “It’s about making the story happy.” Toward the book’s end, the author describes how the literary landscape is shifting more toward flash and then closes with a promising list of 100 prompts. Stohlman relates her work in short, vignettelike chapters, mirroring her content through form and crisply driving her points home (“Discover what you don’t need to say”). In a book full of excellent tips, the section on collecting flash fiction into book form is particularly beneficial; she advocates relishing the organization process and embracing “accidents” in one’s work, because if one knows too much about what one is writing, she says, “it gets boring.” As she argues, “flash fiction has an almost desperate need to tell a story before it’s too late.” Overall, this is a fast-paced and memorable work.
A fun and eminently useful literary treasure map. (appendix, acknowledgements, author bio)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-912095-79-7
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Ad Hoc Fiction
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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