Episode 098 - Redefining Indy Success through Short Fiction with Ran Walker
September 21, 2021
Ran Walker discusses what made him move from long-form fiction to short fiction, and specifically to drabbles, short stories of exactly 100 words; what platforms he uses to get his short fiction into readers’ hands; the benefits he has gained by building relationships with libraries; and his accidental success in France.
Ran Walker is the author of twenty-four books. His short stories, flash fiction, microfiction, and poetry have appeared in a variety of anthologies and journals. Before becoming a writer and educator, he worked in magazine publishing and practiced law in Mississippi.
Ran Walker is the author of twenty-four books. His short stories, flash fiction, microfiction, and poetry have appeared in a variety of anthologies and journals. Before becoming a writer and educator, he worked in magazine publishing and practiced law in Mississippi.
He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Indie Author Project's 2019 National Indie Author of the Year Award, the 2019 Black Caucus of the American Library Association Best Fiction Ebook Award, the 2018 Virginia Indie Author Project Award for Adult Fiction, and the 2021 Blind Corner Afrofuturism Microfiction Contest.
Ran is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Hampton University, is a contributor to Writer’s Digest, and teaches with Writer's Digest University. He lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.
Ran is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Hampton University, is a contributor to Writer’s Digest, and teaches with Writer's Digest University. He lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.
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[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author podcast. Today my guest is Ran Walker. Hey, Ran, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Ran: I'm doing well. How are you, Matty?
[00:00:07] Matty: I am doing great. Thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Ran Walker is the author of 24 books. His short stories flash fiction, micro fiction and poetry have appeared in a variety of anthologies and journals. Before becoming a writer and educator, he worked in magazine publishing and practiced law in Mississippi. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including The Indy Author Project's 2019 National Indie Author of the Year Award, the 2019 Black Caucus of the American Library Association's best fiction ebook award, and the 2018 Virginia Indie Author project award for adult fiction, and the 2021 Blind Corner Afro Futurism Micro Fiction contest.
[00:00:46] He is the assistant professor of English and creative writing at Hampton University and is a contributor to WRITER'S DIGEST - we'll be talking about that a little bit - and teaches with WRITER'S DIGEST University. And he lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter. And I also wanted to put out a thank you to Jane Friedman, who was a guest in Episode 75: Key Book Publishing Paths, for introducing me to Ran.
[00:01:12] Matty: So what we're going to be talking about today is redefining indie success through short fiction, but I have the feeling we may be hitting on a number of topics, so we'll just see where the conversation takes us.
[00:01:22] And, Ran, before we start diving into that particular topic, I was wondering if you could describe when you first started considering your publishing options, what route did you decide to pursue at that point? And has that route changed over time?
[00:01:37] Ran: Yes. When I originally got started with publishing, I was using a literary agent and the literary agent was shopping the book and we came close a couple of times, but it never quite came to fruition.
[00:01:51] And she just suggested I start on the next book. And while all of this was going on over the course of seven years, I started seeing where people were publishing their own work on Amazon’s Kindle platform. And I thought maybe that's something I should try. And I did. And eventually I did a number of books there, but it wasn't until around my 16th book that actually won an award and then everything changed.
[00:02:15] So it was a very long process. But I don't regret anything. I think you learn something every step of the way. And it just happened to work out for me this time.
[00:02:26] Matty: Obviously you have a lot of experience winning awards. Do you think that one propagates others? Like once you've won one award, does it position you better to be a contender for others? ...
[00:00:06] Ran: I'm doing well. How are you, Matty?
[00:00:07] Matty: I am doing great. Thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Ran Walker is the author of 24 books. His short stories flash fiction, micro fiction and poetry have appeared in a variety of anthologies and journals. Before becoming a writer and educator, he worked in magazine publishing and practiced law in Mississippi. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including The Indy Author Project's 2019 National Indie Author of the Year Award, the 2019 Black Caucus of the American Library Association's best fiction ebook award, and the 2018 Virginia Indie Author project award for adult fiction, and the 2021 Blind Corner Afro Futurism Micro Fiction contest.
[00:00:46] He is the assistant professor of English and creative writing at Hampton University and is a contributor to WRITER'S DIGEST - we'll be talking about that a little bit - and teaches with WRITER'S DIGEST University. And he lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter. And I also wanted to put out a thank you to Jane Friedman, who was a guest in Episode 75: Key Book Publishing Paths, for introducing me to Ran.
[00:01:12] Matty: So what we're going to be talking about today is redefining indie success through short fiction, but I have the feeling we may be hitting on a number of topics, so we'll just see where the conversation takes us.
[00:01:22] And, Ran, before we start diving into that particular topic, I was wondering if you could describe when you first started considering your publishing options, what route did you decide to pursue at that point? And has that route changed over time?
[00:01:37] Ran: Yes. When I originally got started with publishing, I was using a literary agent and the literary agent was shopping the book and we came close a couple of times, but it never quite came to fruition.
[00:01:51] And she just suggested I start on the next book. And while all of this was going on over the course of seven years, I started seeing where people were publishing their own work on Amazon’s Kindle platform. And I thought maybe that's something I should try. And I did. And eventually I did a number of books there, but it wasn't until around my 16th book that actually won an award and then everything changed.
[00:02:15] So it was a very long process. But I don't regret anything. I think you learn something every step of the way. And it just happened to work out for me this time.
[00:02:26] Matty: Obviously you have a lot of experience winning awards. Do you think that one propagates others? Like once you've won one award, does it position you better to be a contender for others? ...
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[00:02:38] Ran: You know, this is going to sound funny, but I don't think that it does. I think that two of the awards are one were sponsored by the same agency. But the third, the Black Caucus Award, was happening simultaneously while the others were happening. So they had no idea that I'd already won an award for that book.
[00:03:00] And so that was exciting to know that if they were looking at it separately and coming to the same conclusion. And I haven't really won a lot of things since then. So I don't think that necessarily feeds into the next thing. Although sometimes you just get lucky and when those things happen, you just ride them and make the best of them while they're happening.
[00:03:20] Matty: So in the bio, you talked about both flash fiction and micro fiction. And I'm wondering if you could just talk about, are those a different? Is one a subcategory of the other? What is the difference between those two terms?
[00:03:33] Ran: It's exactly what you said: one is a subcategory of the other.
[00:03:36] So when we think about flash fiction, you're thinking about pieces that are between 300 words and a thousand words, sometimes people might go to 1250 or 1500, but it's generally in that category. But micro fiction things are a little bit shorter. So we would think of 300 and fewer. And with what I do, it's 100-words or fewer.
[00:03:58] So yeah, there's a slight difference there. And I think that because of the difference, you actually have to write them differently.
[00:04:06] Matty: For people who are watching the video, I'll just say, I felt very fortunate that I got this issue of WRITER'S DIGEST just a couple of days ago. This is the September / October 2021 issue and Ran's article "10 Reasons to Write a 100-word Story" was one of the ones in here. So I thought, oh, how serendipitous.
[00:04:23] So let's just jump right to what gripped you specifically about 100-word stories and please share some of the tips that you hit on in that WRITER'S DIGEST article.
[00:04:36] Ran: When I originally started writing shorter and shorter stories because I felt like I was saying too much. Some stories don't really require all of the extra exposition and all of those details. So I was looking for something that was shorter, and I had just finished experimenting with the poetic form called the Kwansaba. Kwansaba is a 1449-word poem. Seven lines, seven words per line, and no word of more than seven letters.
[00:05:02] So working with those kinds of restrictions was something I felt comfortable with. Because a lot of times you don't really know what's good within a particular space. And for me, I actually started with 50-word stories and then grew to a hundred-word stories. But it was, Grant Faulkner had a book called FISHERS that I looked at and really enjoyed.
[00:05:23] And I started just reading a lot of different 100-word stories and thinking to myself, this is a space I could cut my teeth in, try out. And the first few that I wrote were not very good, but eventually I started getting better and I started getting more acceptances to different journals and finally decided to write my own book.
[00:05:44] Matty: You had said some of the early ones weren't very good. Either at the time or looking back, what measuring stick are you holding up that makes you say that the early efforts weren't that good?
[00:05:54] Ran: I was writing longer stories and trying to cut them down to 100 words. And I like to tell people it's like the Michael Jackson plastic surgery theory I have here. There's only so much you should take off before it's too much. And I was doing 2002 Michael Jackson nose to my stories. Too much was gone. I was losing the effect, the resonance of the story, by starting with these and then trying to cut them down.
[00:06:25] And so I decided to work from the opposite direction. So you think about the apocryphal story that Hemingway supposedly wrote, "For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn." Or even the Augusto Monterroso story, " The Dinosaur," "When she awoke, the dinosaur was still there." If you start with a story that small, it's easier to build on to that than to try to cut down on something that was never meant to be a hundred words to begin with. So that's just the switch that I had to hit in my own brain.
[00:06:56] Matty: It's very interesting. We're recording this on September 4th and on, September 3rd, I had a Zoom meeting with Mark Lefebvre because Mark and I are going to be doing a webinar on short fiction craft for the Self-Publishing Conference. And we had just, as a whim, decided that we would write a 100-word short story. It must've been like 100-words was in the air yesterday. After the call, we got off the call and I started writing and I wrote what I thought was going to be the introduction.
[00:07:29] And I was at 134 words. I was like, oh yeah, I'm going to have to way readjust how I go about it. Just like you're saying, that idea of you have a big idea and you cut it down is tough.
[00:07:42] So when you're looking at the hundred-word stories, and this may lead into the conversation about tips, how do you go into it knowing that you have an idea that is going to lend itself to 100 words and not 500 words that then need to be condensed?
[00:07:58] Ran: My wife gave me the perfect analogy here. Think of your story idea like a seed. The size of the pot will determine the size of the plant. If you know upfront that you're going to have a small pot, then you begin to think about it as a small plant. See the thing is a lot of times people come into it and the idea is just so big that they can never get it down to that point. One thing that I do when I am getting my ideas, especially if the idea seems larger to begin with, start trying to figure out exactly what that narrative arc is, and then figure out what is the most interesting point within the arc and start trying to build your story there, as opposed to everything that you thought. So it's just a matter of you getting closer and closer to what's interesting and important in the story with your own magnifying glass and then telling what's in that lens as opposed to what's all around it.
[00:08:57] Matty: This is a little bit unfair because I didn't prep you to do this and we can always take a little break if you need to, but I think it would be great to hear one of your 100-word short stories. Are you in a position where you can find one?
[00:09:09] Ran: Sure. Let me see, I actually have one of my books here.
[00:09:19] Matty: Let us know what book that is.
[00:09:21] Ran: The book is KEEP IT 100. And there is a story that I mentioned in the WRITER'S DIGEST article, and it's called "The Tears" or "Tears in the Fabric of Us." It's what I call a homographic title where it can be read either way. Since I didn't include it in the article, I figured I can share it with you here.
[00:09:39] It's called "Tears" or "Tears in the Fabric of Us," and it's after Kate Chopin.
Her plan had always been to outlive him. She was from a generation where you hunkered down and picked up the broken dishes, kept a smile on your face for the kids, then busied yourself with clubs that were filled with women who were doing the same.
They’d never been compatible, always trying to avoid a third rail that triggered one interminable argument. Even as she approached her 52nd anniversary, she prayed for freedom.
Early that morning, she woke to find he’d died in his sleep. Everyone assumed her flood of tears was from grief.
[00:10:24] She was fine with that.
[00:10:29] Matty: Can you describe a little bit the process of writing that story? Was that one that started small, and you built up versus started larger and cut down?
[00:10:37] Ran: Sure. So the original story, THE STORY OF AN HOUR, have you read that, Matty? You should definitely check it out. It's a great book. It's heavily anthologized. You can find free copies of it online. But in this short story, a woman learns ...well they preface everything by telling you that she has a heart condition. She learns that morning that her husband on his way to work on a train, the train actually wrecked. And I think most of the people in the wreck perished.
[00:11:07] And at first, she starts to grieve. And then she starts to feel excited because now she gets a chance to live the life that she's always wanted to live. Freedom is right there in her grasp because before she had to perform the roles of the marriage, this, that, and the other, and now she gets to be who she really wants to be. And at the end of the story, her husband returns. It turns out he wasn't on the train after all. And when she sees him, her heart gives out and she dies. And they say, oh, it's that kind of joy, she died from being so excited and so overcome with joy. When it was actually the opposite. And so I was thinking it would be really nice to give a character like that a happier ending, have her actually outlive him. And let people make of that what they will. But she knows exactly what that mean.
[00:12:03] So I started with that idea upfront, knowing that I wanted her to outlive him. And I just need to give enough details for that to happen and then give just enough space for people to misinterpret the reaction, just like with the original story. So that's how I approached it, knowing that I didn't really need a lot of space other than to set up the situation and then to give the ending that I needed for it to have.
[00:12:32] Matty: Are other stories often the inspiration for your, so I understand they're drabbles, is that right? A hundred words, a hundred word story, excluding the title of the author name is a drabble.
[00:12:44] Ran: In this particular book. I had several of them. I think I might have five or six that were based off of other stories. It's like, when you read a story and you wonder what happens next or did the author realize what they were doing here could have been done in a different way? So, in the KEEP IT 100 collection, I did do a story that was in response to CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY by Roald Dahl. Did one that was in response to Shirley Jackson's THE LOTTERY. I think I did another one in response to William Faulkner's A ROSE FOR EMILY. And so there’s several of them, but most of them are not the case.
[00:13:24] I do think if you're trying to write for fun and get ideas, it is good to kind of look at what somebody else did. And I wouldn't exactly call it fan fiction. I think of it more as a kind of a fictional critique. And cause a lot of these are still under copyright law, I don't use the same name. Like, there's not a Tessie Hutchinson, you know, there's a Henderson or something. You know, it's just enough to jog people's memories as to what was going on in another story and how my story is slightly different, but it does extend from a similar or parallel universe.
[00:14:02] Matty: I do like the idea of taking a well-known story and then giving it that twist as you did with the story that you read, where you gave it the happy ending, happy-ish ending, rather than the sad ending. So this is all great because tomorrow I have to have my drabble finished for the class I'm doing with Mark Lefebvre, and I realized that, and maybe it's because I'm a mystery suspense writer and so the story as it stands now ends on the question that otherwise would be answered by the remainder of the book.
[00:14:35] So the implication is she's come upon a body and a house, and the last two lines as it stands now are, the door had been left open in the inside of the house was just as cold as the outside. It would be hard for them to determine the cause of death. Wouldn't it? And I thought, oh, that's cool. But then I thought it's cool, but it would be cool as like the first chapter of a book. And I'm not sure I'm complying with the requirement to tell a full story because I've kind of wrapped up that scene.
[00:15:05] But what is your thought about that? To what extent does the short fiction or the piece of micro fiction have to wrap it up rather than opening a new question?
[00:15:16] Ran: I think a lot of that might come or stem from using a traditional plot structure that people using like the Freytag plot arc, where you have the exposition rising action, a climax, and so forth. People tend to think of stories in that way. And I think with 100-word stories, you have to step back and not necessarily look at that type of arc or look at the hero's journey as the formula that you use to write.
[00:15:45] With a mystery, and this might actually sound almost like anti mystery as far as I was concerned, it be interesting to actually start with the ending, and then have people responding to the ending. I think a lot of times with stories, especially the ones I do with my students, they oftentimes get caught up on, let me do the surprise ending, and we're going to leave you on a cliffhanger. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with that.
[00:16:15] But personally, I'm more concerned about how people react to that thing that is the cliffhanger. And I try to create the story in such a way that I give space for the characters to actually respond. And it feels to me more like a full story that way. But you know, I'm not here to discourage anybody from O. Henry style structures with their stories because some of the best ones are that way.
[00:16:38] Some of my favorite stories end with that kind of surprise ending, but I don't tend to write a lot of stories that have surprise endings. Instead I choose to have the characters reacting to that thing, and then allowing that to be the resonance. Because you'd be surprised. People's reactions can sometimes be even more interesting than the thing that you thought was the surprise ending.
[00:17:01] There is a documentary called THE IMPOSTER. And what's interesting about this documentary, this is a storyline, I'll be really brief with it, in this storyline a family has a son who's about 12 years go missing. He's walking to school one day, vanishes. And then a decade later, they get a message from Spain or some other country indicating that the son has been found and wants to come home.
[00:17:29] Now while all this is going on, you actually see this con man staring into the camera saying, I'm going to pretend to be this kid and go home, go and make a life in America as these people's lost son. And he goes, and the family accepts them. So there you have something strange and then you have an even stranger thing in the reaction. And then an investigator's brought into this whole thing and he assumes the only reason why the family would have accepted him as a son would be because they were actually aware of what happened to the original sign in the first place.
[00:18:02] And the film actually ends with the guy, the investigator digging up the backyard, trying to find the bones. That's what I'm talking about. The reaction of people is sometimes far more interesting than the thing itself. So that's a philosophy that I use.
[00:18:18] Matty: I think I would be irritated if the story ended with them digging up the yard.
[00:18:25] Ran: Yeah, but the thing is that you arrive at this very horrifying conclusion, and you know, he's probably not going to find anything there, but all of a sudden, the focus that we had on this imposter coming in is now shifted to the family and what their involvement might've been. It becomes a true crime story of a different type. Yeah. I definitely liked that.
[00:18:53] Matty: You had mentioned the fact that, the story read had, the word that could be pronounced "teers" or as "tares." Is wordplay more important in micro fiction than in longer fiction, do you think?
[00:19:07] Ran: Yeah, I would think so because you have fewer words to deal with, so every word matters that much. So if you only have a hundred words, you have to answer the question yourself as the writer, should I possibly include a little bit of alliteration here, or maybe a little assonance or some poetic techniques that you wouldn't really be able to do the longer piece, because it would get buried in a much larger narrative, but here you can do it in different ways.
[00:19:36] I like to think of drabbles as the kind of fiction that poets would, just as much as people who, enjoy short fiction. So, yeah, I use it as an opportunity to play around with things. Not to be heavy handed with it, but you know, like a sprinkle of paprika.
[00:20:22] Matty: So how do you distinguish between something like a drabble, the 100-word story, and poetry?
[00:20:29] Ran: So there's a very fine line there and I've actually come to this conclusion. And I think that Nancy Stoltman, she's a really major player in the micro fiction space, she kind of alluded to this and I agree with it that a lot of times people will call it whatever you name it. So something could be very much, in your mind, a poem, but if you call it something other than a poem, then they will accept that. The book that I had the award for, DAYKEEPER, that won an award for being a novel, but that novel was only 160 pages, so it's really more of a novella. But if I call it a novel, everyone else calls it a novel. And a lot of times it's just a matter of what you choose to call it.
[00:21:22] Another thing too, and I know that people who are really sticklers about this will say that there needs to be some evidence that a story is taking place, even if you're finishing the story in your head or beginning the story in your head, it needs to be evidence that there's some type of a movement with the characters. But at the same time you have prose poems that are narrative poems where that happens. So I guess it boils down to the individual and how they choose to think about it themselves as the artists and how they choose to present it to the world.
[00:21:52] I just wrote a piece for a friend of mine. He's doing a collection of superhero poems, and I wrote a 100-word story that I'm calling a poem. And I've stretched it so that it looks that way and that it feels that way and that it reads that way, but that I can still use it for my own fiction collection later on.
[00:22:16] And another writer who does this very well is a writer from Mississippi, my home state, her name is Beth Ann Fennelly, the Poet Laureate of Mississippi, she teaches at Ole Miss. She did a memoir called HEATING AND COOLING and it's basically micro nonfiction. But at least a quarter of the pieces in the collection were published in poetry journals before they were put in the micro memoir book. So she was able to see the duality of the pieces and treat them as such. So that would be the way I would suggest to people to consider it.
[00:22:50] Ran: I think that Dinty Moore has been doing brevity for quite a bit. You can see examples of people writing micro memoirs. You would approach it, probably, I'm guessing, the same way you would approach fiction. Figure out what the story is, what the space is you're trying to communicate. And once you start involving point of view and dealing with the narrative structure that we would use in fiction, it pretty much reads very similarly to fiction. So I think there's definitely space there for people to create something that's unique in that space.
[00:23:22] Matty: How long does it take you to write and complete a 100-word story?
[00:23:27] Ran: Hmm. That's an interesting question. I think it's more about the idea. So I'm a lawyer. I've been a lawyer for a long time, although I don't actively practice. My father was a lawyer for 47 years, recently retired. And one of the things he would say is that a lot of my job is thinking about things. I mean, literally thinking. Like he would be sitting at his desk like this. Like, are you working? Yes. I'm deep in thought and when I'm ready, I act. So I treat it very similarly with my own writing.
[00:24:01] And I will say this. Some days I don't write anything. And other days I'll write five stories. Like this morning I got up and I had like really three different ideas. So what I did was just wrote the first sentence of each idea. And then when I'm ready, I come back and just finish that off. I can give you an example too, being it is so recent. So this morning I got up and I thought about a friend of mine, before he got married, he went to Pamplona, Spain and ran with the bulls. I thought about that.
[00:24:38] And then I thought about, you know, there's a show called HOT ONES. It's on YouTube where people eat really spicy hot wings and the Scoville rating goes up exponentially with each wing that they eat. And then the whole thing is, can you finish the entire row of wings.
[00:24:55] And then I thought about Barack Obama when he was dating Michelle Obama and he had this car that was so old and raggedy that the floor was worn out and you could see the street while you're driving.
[00:25:09] And so I just jotted those things down. And before I knew it, I'd written a story called THE BULLS, and I can share it with you, a draft of it. I'm still working on it. It's called THE BULLS.
Shortly before everything went to shit, and I'm sorry if I'm offending any of your listeners, Tommy traveled to Pamplona, Spain, to run with the bulls. It had been an item on his bucket list for quite some time, and he’d convinced himself it was time to stop putting it off.
He’d never ridden an adrenaline wave so strong, trying to outrun the heavy slapping of hooves against cobblestone, as people yelled in admiration and fear.
When the days of the pandemic wore on, he would remember the moment he ran so fast he couldn’t feel his legs beneath him and know that he’d survived before and would survive again.
[00:26:07] So that's one I actually wrote shortly before we went live with this conversation.
[00:26:13] Matty: So in that case, a very short amount of time between that noodling on the idea and committing it to electronic paper. Do you feel like that's quite close to being finalized? Or what is your editing process like for these a 100-word stories?
[00:26:27] Ran: So I would look at it and ask myself, do I really want to use the four-letter word? Is it the most effective word? Cause I think about this. If you're going to put a word in there like that, it has to be the right word. I'm not a person who believes that you avoid certain words because you lack the vocabulary to express yourself adequately. I just think that each word has a particular emotional effect upon the reader. So I want to think about that word. I want to think about whether or not I wanted to create a little bit more in terms of the environment of running with the bulls. Cause right now I have "the heavy slapping of hooves against cobblestone." And then I want to see if I want to keep the pandemic component there because there's so much about the pandemic that we're still dealing with and that may or may not be the best turn in the story.
[00:27:17] So yeah, I would look at it and sleep on it and come back to it, poke and prod at it. Change a thing here, let it breathe, change a thing there. Always cognizant of the word count. Cause sometimes you get an idea. Okay, I'm going to do away with the third paragraph altogether, so that gives me back 25 words. How do I make this story even better with those 25 words? So that's how I approach it.
[00:27:43] Matty: Is there a period of time where you have to set it aside before you can go back and look at it with fresh eyes?
[00:27:50] Ran: You know, that's a really good question. I can't say there's a particular amount of time. I think it's more like a mood. I read so many things and I consume so much media. And I think about so many different things. So when I returned to it, it used to take me a while. It used to take me weeks of separation from something to look at it objectively. But because I teach and I write and I read so much, it's very easy to cleanse my palate of the story. And I can return to it in a couple of hours and see it in a very different light. But that's because I've trained and conditioned myself to do that. Plus it's only a hundred words, so it's much easier to do it that way than it is if you were writing something that was 60,000 words.
[00:28:31] Matty: Right. I remember, a friend of mine and I were goofing around on a chat, and we had this idea for the 100-word story, but we had to do it in three minutes or something like that. And I remember I had some reference to the person comes from Philadelphia. And I ended up with 99 words. So I changed him to coming from New York because that rounded out the number. The other dilemma I had was that I had a reference to a four-poster bed in this one that I'm just working on now, and I had to look up whether that was hyphenated or not. And then whether Word would count that as one word or two words. It's very finicky.
[00:29:11] Ran: I tend to look at all hyphenated words as one word.
[00:29:14] Matty: Yeah, I think Word agrees with you.
[00:29:15] Ran: It's interesting you say that cause I've done the same thing. Sometimes it's a matter of how you say a particular name. Maybe I had a name that was a first and last name and it was pushing me to 101. How important is the last name here? And then you take the last name off and then you fall in word count. So yes, a lot of that manipulation goes on. And the thing about it, the final reader has no idea that you even played around with it that way, but you know what you had to cut to get to that point.
[00:29:44] Matty: it was funny when Mark and I originally came up with this idea for the thing for the webinar, we had said a hundred words, including title and the author name. And then I read your article and I saw that it explicitly excludes title and author name, so I proposed to Mark that we changed that, which gave me six extra words. It's like, this is so exciting. I have six extra words to work with.
[00:30:06] I also saw that in an interview you did with Jane Friedman, you mentioned that you are also interested in songwriting. Did I get that right?
[00:30:14] Ran: Well, I used to write songs back in the day. I'm more of a micro fiction writer at this point. But it was a part of the history of getting to where I am.
[00:30:22] Matty: Is that ever something that you want to return to? Because I can imagine that writing lyrics is very much like writing micro fiction.
[00:30:29] Ran: Honestly, I haven't really thought about it. I was doing a lot of rhythm and blues and so many of the songs in rhythm and blues are based around love. And there's only so many different ways you can tell that story before it just becomes cliche city. If I did return to music, it probably would be lyricless music, more instrumental things. I've been listening to a lot of jazz lately and I'm getting ideas in that space, but I try to channel that into the writing.
[00:30:55] Matty: Do you listen to music while you write the micro fiction?
[00:30:59] Ran: Sometimes. Yeah, some stories are directly inspired by the songs I listen to where others are not. But the easiest thing for me to do is just put on some jazz, particularly like a piano trio, where it's just a piano, the drummer, and upright bass, something mellow in the background, and then find the idea, hook into the idea and build around it.
[00:31:22] Matty: Describe a little bit your evolution from novel length works to the micro fiction as a lead-in to, is it something that you would go back and forth between, or do you feel like you're kind of for the time being on the micro fiction route and that's where you plan to be for a while?
[00:31:36] Ran: Oh, that's a very good question. So I started writing novels because that's what everybody said that you had to write in order to be successful. And I wrote several of them. And it takes time to write a novel and you have to kind of sometimes go into spaces that you hadn't originally anticipated in order to create enough of a word count to justify it being called a novel.
[00:32:00] When given the choice, I started shifting towards novellas and short stories and it got to a point where everything I was writing was getting shorter and shorter. And when I learned about flash fiction, I started writing flash fiction. And then when I learned about micro fiction, I started writing micro fiction.
[00:32:20] Now that I've been writing micro fiction exclusively since 2018, I've started playing around with something very different. In fact, my next book, which comes out in October is a book in which I use 100 100-word chapters to tell a complete novel or narrative arc. And the book is called A BURST OF GRAY. And I don't think that's been done before. I know there are things called novellas in flash. Nancy Stohlman created something called a flash novel. But each of my chapters are 100-words each to the T. And the entire story is told over the course of 100 of those.
[00:33:04] And like I said, I don't think has been done before. I started to give a name to it. But then I realized that marketing wise people won't really know what that is unless you tell them. So rather than say like A BURST OF GRAY: A Micro Novel, I called it A BURST OF GRAY: A Novel in 100-word Stories. That way people will know immediately what it is upfront and not have to read a prologue that I've written explaining the science behind the form.
[00:33:31] I figured that there are plenty of other spaces you can write articles about what you're doing. But it was definitely inspired by what people have been doing before with both the flash novel and novella flash. But that's how I tend to treat novel ideas that I have now. Use the form that I'm working with and try to do new things with it, create novellas with it, create novelettes with it.
[00:33:53] I think about Stephen King's book, DIFFERENT SEASONS, where you have the novellas for each of the seasons. Maybe doing 25 100-word stories that are part of a larger narrative arc and then stacking them against each other. So, yeah, there are a lot of things that I would love to try with this that have never been done. And that's how I'm choosing to marry the two ideas.
[00:34:16] Matty: I wanted to use that as a chance to segue from the craft side to the business side, because I'd be curious as to your thoughts about, if people are intrigued with this, they're working on their a hundred-word stories, what are some of the routes they can take to get those into the hands of readers?
[00:34:35] Ran: You can always submit to different places. There are lots of competitions that are out there. A lot of them do require that you pay a fee to enter the competition. I think my biggest concern with that, I won't call it an issue, I'll call it a concern, is that the requirements for submission often times don't fit what I'm doing.
[00:34:57] For example, if it's micro fiction that they're accepting, a collection of micro fiction, they normally have a page count. Like, you know, 150 pages. Like I just gave you a hundred stories and those hundred stories exists on a hundred pages. So I don't have 150 pages. Or maybe they want you to give them a hundred pages, but they want it to be 22,000 words or more. And I'm like, no, it's 10,000 words. The math is really easy.
[00:35:24] And I ended up not being able to fit the bill for a lot of competitions going on. So the question then is, well, what do you do then? One thing you can do is disguise, I know this sounds really bad, but disguise your collection as a collection of poems, because that would work. You know, people are used to seeing a collection of poems that are 50 to 70 pages. If you can find someone who's willing to look at the poetic aspects of your work and treat it as such, even if it is called a story.
[00:35:55] The other thing, the thing that I particularly enjoy, is just doing it myself. I think over the years I've built up a skill set and gradually a platform that allows me to do these things myself without really worrying about how other people would deal with them. Because it's not about them liking the stories. It's about me selling them on the form. So I have a two-part job. I have to convince him that 100-word stories actually have value. And then that mine are actually good enough to be published. That's two steps.
[00:36:29] And what I've chosen to do is just submit the individual stories to different journals to get them published. And then when it comes time for the collection, then do the collection myself. And it has worked out very well so far, and I'm likely to keep doing it, although I'm not closing off the opportunity to work with a more traditional publishers in the process.
[00:36:50] Matty: When you have a new book available, what routes do you take to alert people that it's out there? Do you do ads, do you do in person events when that's available? Virtual events?
[00:37:01] Ran: Good question. So I've done a little bit of all of those things, but the most effective thing for me is actually doing events, talking with people.
[00:37:10] I remember when Bill Clinton ran for president in 92, a lot of people voted for him because they had actually met him. He was the only candidate that actually shaken hands with. And so for me, you keep an understanding that your sales will be modest because you're in an area where sales are modest. But you want to meet as many different people, evangelize for the form as much as possible, and then just gradually grow your readership from a grassroots level.
[00:37:37] So I enjoy talking to people. I enjoy doing interviews. I enjoy speaking with classes and enjoy teaching classes and talking about things. I have a few events coming up this fall. And then of course, a lot of things I do with WRITER'S DIGEST actually allow me to reach a larger group of people as well.
[00:37:56] But it's a process. It's different. You have to find something that works for you. And do you do whatever you have access to or what makes the most sense at the time. But one of the things that to me yields the greatest results is just being able to meet and interact with people. I think if people actually see you and what you're doing, then they're more likely to take a chance on you and your work.
[00:38:17] Matty: Are those events focused around bookstores and libraries primarily?
[00:38:22] Ran: Very good question there. So with bookstores, not so much. I've done a few bookstores in the past, but I love libraries. I think that libraries are the secret sauce to the whole thing. If you think about this, if you're a person who is an indy writer and you're looking for a place to go and do a reading, a place to do a signing, a place to do a talk, because they're always really good with community engagement. And figure out a way to tie your book into something larger that would help the community.
[00:38:55] I live in Hampton, Virginia, and I believe there four, I think four or five branches to our library here. I could hit up each of those then go to Newport News, which is literally one mile away, and they have five libraries. And I could spend the entire year and not get beyond 150 miles of my house and still meet new people, express new ideas, sell books, become ingrained in the community that supports me. I think it's an amazing thing, to use libraries that way, plus libraries actually have income or they have money in their budgets set up to buy books.
[00:39:36] A lot of times we would go places like with bookstores, they'll carry it. It will sit on the shelf with 30,000 other books. And unless somebody knows specifically to come to that section and look for your book, it might get returned to some point. Whereas librarians, once they know you and they buy into what you're doing, they will purchase your books. And that's an ongoing thing. And then if you look at the numbers and the studies have been done around people checking out books from the library, a lot of times those people will go and buy not only subsequent books from the author, but sometimes that book that they checked out as well.
[00:40:13] So it's a different way of getting known, and it's a wonderful network that you can tap into that doesn't require you to have to go and haggle with anybody, or okay, now your stuff was done over here, so we have to figure out how we want to ring this up and if you don't sell out of what they have there in stock and all of it's going back. And then would have various it's different thing. And you can bring in your own books and sell. So it's a lot of different things you can do with them. And they're the best curators, in my opinion, for books and they have that relationship with the community that's to me a lot more authentic.
[00:40:48] And in many cases, the closest bookstore to me is Barnes and Noble. So if you have a local bookstore that you feel comfortable with, that you can have that relationship with, I would definitely create that. But at the same time, do not neglect the library because they will be talking about your book everywhere they go. And they are a very connected group of people. So it's a very wonderful thing to be on their lips as they're talking about what they're enjoying reading.
[00:41:15] Matty: Yeah, whenever I got the opportunity, I know some listeners will groan that I'm saying it again, but whenever I get the opportunity, I always like to emphasize, as you are, the business benefits as well as the community benefits of libraries and the fact that you can charge more, libraries are willing to pay more for an ebook, for example, than a one-time customer would. So I sell my eBooks, where they would be 4.99 normally on retail platforms, the library price is 29.99, which is still much cheaper than if they were buying a comparable A list bestseller book.
[00:41:46] Ran: And the problem that they have for years. But yeah, that was a really big headache where they would embargo books and then charge way too much for something. It's digital. So to control the number digitally. You're kind of forcing things into a box where a box doesn't really exist, but you're telling people that it does.
[00:42:05] Now for indy writers there's The Indie Author Project, and they're really good with this because they do curate independent books, but they will get them into libraries. And they have this system where, when people check out, it's unlimited checkouts, which is something very different than what the Big Five were doing. You know, you're paying $89, but you get what two on that, two checkouts on that.
[00:42:32] And so it's a way to get into that system. And I think a lot of librarians are really interested in trying to find the best way economically to engage with authors and still be able to serve their customer base. But I like what you said about that, you get to charge a library of price, but your price is still miles away from John Grisham. You know, John Grisham's books are going to be very expensive for the library. And they have to buy several of those licenses just because of the demand. So yeah, that's definitely a place where Indies have a chance to really shine.
[00:43:10] Matty: And some libraries also will pay speaker fees, you're never going to get a speaker fee at a bookstore, so that's another income opportunity. And I really like the idea of what you were saying about sometimes when people check a book out of the library, then they want to purchase it. And I would think that would be especially true for things like collections of short stories or collections of micro fiction, because unlike a novel where you check it out, you read through it, and you return it. You know, off and done with it. those kinds of books are ones, in my case anyway, that I like to read a little bit and then I like to put it aside and then a month later I'll think, oh, I really liked this story. I want to go back and reread it. So it's the kind of thing that I want it in my library, I don't want to be checking it in and out and having the library checkout be the entree to sales, as you're saying.
[00:43:56] So the last thing I wanted to ask you about is when I was on your website, there is a page in French. Can you give us some background on that?
[00:44:04] Ran: Sometimes you just get lucky. And I don't know if it was Churchill who said about preparation meets opportunity. So I had a book, a blues novel that I'd written. My agent at the time did not really care much for the book. So much so that she never acknowledged receipt of the manuscript. And she finally said, well, you knew that wasn't going to sell so I don't know why you sent it to me expecting me to respond. And I was like, oh, okay.
[00:44:35] So I decided to go ahead and self-publish it. And I self-published it and nothing happened. A handful of American sales and that was it. I did end up making a friend who is a writer who lives in England. His name is Richard Walls. And he had just come back from Clarksdale, Mississippi, which is where the story is set, although I use a fictional name. And it hit him in such a way that he wrote to me, and we developed a very strong relationship with each other and he's still a very close writer friend of mine to this day.
[00:45:09] But then something else strange happened. I got an email from this guy in France, and he was like, do you have the French rights to your story? And I'm like, I self-publish. I have all the rights to my story. And he was like, I'd be interested in translating your work. And I was like, huh, this is just like that Nigerian prince trying to get money out of the account.
[00:45:33] And so I had to go and check him out and I looked his name up online and saw that he had translated works for Janet Evanovich and a whole string of best-selling authors. And I was like, how in the world did he even find my book? And so I say, yes, you can translate it. Fine. Cool. And he asked me, do you mind if I shop the book to different publishers, because I have good relationship with the publishers here. And I was like, have at it. I mean, I had done everything that I planned to do with the book. The book was out there, and it was just done.
[00:46:06] And he found a publisher for it. And they were like, we really want to publish the book. And it was Éditions Autrement. It's a smaller publisher but it's under a larger publishing company. And I was curious, I'm like, why? Because after we got into negotiations, I was like, what is it about this book that's fascinating to you? And at the time I was speaking with the executive director of the publishing house, and she started saying, well, that does this, that, and the other. It sounded like she was talking about Toni Morrison's books, not my book. Really? And you know, the whole time, just like, yes, I'm going to sign this deal, but I'm just like, what in the world is happening here? I feel like I just stepped into the Twilight Zone.
[00:46:54] So I sign the deal. The book came out, got great reviews. Afterwards another editor ended up coming to the publishing house and she was trying to find books that she believed in that during the first round didn't necessarily have the sales that they deserved, so she created the Great Novels Collection and republished it. And it had a second life over there and I had absolutely nothing to do with it. I've never been to France. I speak only that much French. And it's managed to find a life of its own. I'm always fascinated when people discover the book and then write to me from France about it saying that my English is not very good, but I read your book and I think it's great. And it is just, it's amazing.
[00:47:48] And it's something that just totally happened out of nowhere. But I'm very grateful to the French readers, both in France and in Canada, who have latched onto that book. And it's just been another wonderful experience in this whole indy process.
[00:48:10] Matty: Well, congratulations to you on that and what a lovely note to end on. Thank you so much, Ram. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all your work online.
[00:48:20] Ran: My website, which is RanWalker.com. And I'm only on Twitter. Well, I am on LinkedIn, but Twitter is @RanWalker and, yeah, those are the places you can find me.
[00:48:35] And I really appreciate you inviting me on your show, Matty. I've really enjoyed it.
[00:48:40] Matty: It's been a pleasure. Thank you for talking with me.
[00:03:00] And so that was exciting to know that if they were looking at it separately and coming to the same conclusion. And I haven't really won a lot of things since then. So I don't think that necessarily feeds into the next thing. Although sometimes you just get lucky and when those things happen, you just ride them and make the best of them while they're happening.
[00:03:20] Matty: So in the bio, you talked about both flash fiction and micro fiction. And I'm wondering if you could just talk about, are those a different? Is one a subcategory of the other? What is the difference between those two terms?
[00:03:33] Ran: It's exactly what you said: one is a subcategory of the other.
[00:03:36] So when we think about flash fiction, you're thinking about pieces that are between 300 words and a thousand words, sometimes people might go to 1250 or 1500, but it's generally in that category. But micro fiction things are a little bit shorter. So we would think of 300 and fewer. And with what I do, it's 100-words or fewer.
[00:03:58] So yeah, there's a slight difference there. And I think that because of the difference, you actually have to write them differently.
[00:04:06] Matty: For people who are watching the video, I'll just say, I felt very fortunate that I got this issue of WRITER'S DIGEST just a couple of days ago. This is the September / October 2021 issue and Ran's article "10 Reasons to Write a 100-word Story" was one of the ones in here. So I thought, oh, how serendipitous.
[00:04:23] So let's just jump right to what gripped you specifically about 100-word stories and please share some of the tips that you hit on in that WRITER'S DIGEST article.
[00:04:36] Ran: When I originally started writing shorter and shorter stories because I felt like I was saying too much. Some stories don't really require all of the extra exposition and all of those details. So I was looking for something that was shorter, and I had just finished experimenting with the poetic form called the Kwansaba. Kwansaba is a 1449-word poem. Seven lines, seven words per line, and no word of more than seven letters.
[00:05:02] So working with those kinds of restrictions was something I felt comfortable with. Because a lot of times you don't really know what's good within a particular space. And for me, I actually started with 50-word stories and then grew to a hundred-word stories. But it was, Grant Faulkner had a book called FISHERS that I looked at and really enjoyed.
[00:05:23] And I started just reading a lot of different 100-word stories and thinking to myself, this is a space I could cut my teeth in, try out. And the first few that I wrote were not very good, but eventually I started getting better and I started getting more acceptances to different journals and finally decided to write my own book.
[00:05:44] Matty: You had said some of the early ones weren't very good. Either at the time or looking back, what measuring stick are you holding up that makes you say that the early efforts weren't that good?
[00:05:54] Ran: I was writing longer stories and trying to cut them down to 100 words. And I like to tell people it's like the Michael Jackson plastic surgery theory I have here. There's only so much you should take off before it's too much. And I was doing 2002 Michael Jackson nose to my stories. Too much was gone. I was losing the effect, the resonance of the story, by starting with these and then trying to cut them down.
[00:06:25] And so I decided to work from the opposite direction. So you think about the apocryphal story that Hemingway supposedly wrote, "For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn." Or even the Augusto Monterroso story, " The Dinosaur," "When she awoke, the dinosaur was still there." If you start with a story that small, it's easier to build on to that than to try to cut down on something that was never meant to be a hundred words to begin with. So that's just the switch that I had to hit in my own brain.
[00:06:56] Matty: It's very interesting. We're recording this on September 4th and on, September 3rd, I had a Zoom meeting with Mark Lefebvre because Mark and I are going to be doing a webinar on short fiction craft for the Self-Publishing Conference. And we had just, as a whim, decided that we would write a 100-word short story. It must've been like 100-words was in the air yesterday. After the call, we got off the call and I started writing and I wrote what I thought was going to be the introduction.
[00:07:29] And I was at 134 words. I was like, oh yeah, I'm going to have to way readjust how I go about it. Just like you're saying, that idea of you have a big idea and you cut it down is tough.
[00:07:42] So when you're looking at the hundred-word stories, and this may lead into the conversation about tips, how do you go into it knowing that you have an idea that is going to lend itself to 100 words and not 500 words that then need to be condensed?
[00:07:58] Ran: My wife gave me the perfect analogy here. Think of your story idea like a seed. The size of the pot will determine the size of the plant. If you know upfront that you're going to have a small pot, then you begin to think about it as a small plant. See the thing is a lot of times people come into it and the idea is just so big that they can never get it down to that point. One thing that I do when I am getting my ideas, especially if the idea seems larger to begin with, start trying to figure out exactly what that narrative arc is, and then figure out what is the most interesting point within the arc and start trying to build your story there, as opposed to everything that you thought. So it's just a matter of you getting closer and closer to what's interesting and important in the story with your own magnifying glass and then telling what's in that lens as opposed to what's all around it.
[00:08:57] Matty: This is a little bit unfair because I didn't prep you to do this and we can always take a little break if you need to, but I think it would be great to hear one of your 100-word short stories. Are you in a position where you can find one?
[00:09:09] Ran: Sure. Let me see, I actually have one of my books here.
[00:09:19] Matty: Let us know what book that is.
[00:09:21] Ran: The book is KEEP IT 100. And there is a story that I mentioned in the WRITER'S DIGEST article, and it's called "The Tears" or "Tears in the Fabric of Us." It's what I call a homographic title where it can be read either way. Since I didn't include it in the article, I figured I can share it with you here.
[00:09:39] It's called "Tears" or "Tears in the Fabric of Us," and it's after Kate Chopin.
Her plan had always been to outlive him. She was from a generation where you hunkered down and picked up the broken dishes, kept a smile on your face for the kids, then busied yourself with clubs that were filled with women who were doing the same.
They’d never been compatible, always trying to avoid a third rail that triggered one interminable argument. Even as she approached her 52nd anniversary, she prayed for freedom.
Early that morning, she woke to find he’d died in his sleep. Everyone assumed her flood of tears was from grief.
[00:10:24] She was fine with that.
[00:10:29] Matty: Can you describe a little bit the process of writing that story? Was that one that started small, and you built up versus started larger and cut down?
[00:10:37] Ran: Sure. So the original story, THE STORY OF AN HOUR, have you read that, Matty? You should definitely check it out. It's a great book. It's heavily anthologized. You can find free copies of it online. But in this short story, a woman learns ...well they preface everything by telling you that she has a heart condition. She learns that morning that her husband on his way to work on a train, the train actually wrecked. And I think most of the people in the wreck perished.
[00:11:07] And at first, she starts to grieve. And then she starts to feel excited because now she gets a chance to live the life that she's always wanted to live. Freedom is right there in her grasp because before she had to perform the roles of the marriage, this, that, and the other, and now she gets to be who she really wants to be. And at the end of the story, her husband returns. It turns out he wasn't on the train after all. And when she sees him, her heart gives out and she dies. And they say, oh, it's that kind of joy, she died from being so excited and so overcome with joy. When it was actually the opposite. And so I was thinking it would be really nice to give a character like that a happier ending, have her actually outlive him. And let people make of that what they will. But she knows exactly what that mean.
[00:12:03] So I started with that idea upfront, knowing that I wanted her to outlive him. And I just need to give enough details for that to happen and then give just enough space for people to misinterpret the reaction, just like with the original story. So that's how I approached it, knowing that I didn't really need a lot of space other than to set up the situation and then to give the ending that I needed for it to have.
[00:12:32] Matty: Are other stories often the inspiration for your, so I understand they're drabbles, is that right? A hundred words, a hundred word story, excluding the title of the author name is a drabble.
[00:12:44] Ran: In this particular book. I had several of them. I think I might have five or six that were based off of other stories. It's like, when you read a story and you wonder what happens next or did the author realize what they were doing here could have been done in a different way? So, in the KEEP IT 100 collection, I did do a story that was in response to CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY by Roald Dahl. Did one that was in response to Shirley Jackson's THE LOTTERY. I think I did another one in response to William Faulkner's A ROSE FOR EMILY. And so there’s several of them, but most of them are not the case.
[00:13:24] I do think if you're trying to write for fun and get ideas, it is good to kind of look at what somebody else did. And I wouldn't exactly call it fan fiction. I think of it more as a kind of a fictional critique. And cause a lot of these are still under copyright law, I don't use the same name. Like, there's not a Tessie Hutchinson, you know, there's a Henderson or something. You know, it's just enough to jog people's memories as to what was going on in another story and how my story is slightly different, but it does extend from a similar or parallel universe.
[00:14:02] Matty: I do like the idea of taking a well-known story and then giving it that twist as you did with the story that you read, where you gave it the happy ending, happy-ish ending, rather than the sad ending. So this is all great because tomorrow I have to have my drabble finished for the class I'm doing with Mark Lefebvre, and I realized that, and maybe it's because I'm a mystery suspense writer and so the story as it stands now ends on the question that otherwise would be answered by the remainder of the book.
[00:14:35] So the implication is she's come upon a body and a house, and the last two lines as it stands now are, the door had been left open in the inside of the house was just as cold as the outside. It would be hard for them to determine the cause of death. Wouldn't it? And I thought, oh, that's cool. But then I thought it's cool, but it would be cool as like the first chapter of a book. And I'm not sure I'm complying with the requirement to tell a full story because I've kind of wrapped up that scene.
[00:15:05] But what is your thought about that? To what extent does the short fiction or the piece of micro fiction have to wrap it up rather than opening a new question?
[00:15:16] Ran: I think a lot of that might come or stem from using a traditional plot structure that people using like the Freytag plot arc, where you have the exposition rising action, a climax, and so forth. People tend to think of stories in that way. And I think with 100-word stories, you have to step back and not necessarily look at that type of arc or look at the hero's journey as the formula that you use to write.
[00:15:45] With a mystery, and this might actually sound almost like anti mystery as far as I was concerned, it be interesting to actually start with the ending, and then have people responding to the ending. I think a lot of times with stories, especially the ones I do with my students, they oftentimes get caught up on, let me do the surprise ending, and we're going to leave you on a cliffhanger. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with that.
[00:16:15] But personally, I'm more concerned about how people react to that thing that is the cliffhanger. And I try to create the story in such a way that I give space for the characters to actually respond. And it feels to me more like a full story that way. But you know, I'm not here to discourage anybody from O. Henry style structures with their stories because some of the best ones are that way.
[00:16:38] Some of my favorite stories end with that kind of surprise ending, but I don't tend to write a lot of stories that have surprise endings. Instead I choose to have the characters reacting to that thing, and then allowing that to be the resonance. Because you'd be surprised. People's reactions can sometimes be even more interesting than the thing that you thought was the surprise ending.
[00:17:01] There is a documentary called THE IMPOSTER. And what's interesting about this documentary, this is a storyline, I'll be really brief with it, in this storyline a family has a son who's about 12 years go missing. He's walking to school one day, vanishes. And then a decade later, they get a message from Spain or some other country indicating that the son has been found and wants to come home.
[00:17:29] Now while all this is going on, you actually see this con man staring into the camera saying, I'm going to pretend to be this kid and go home, go and make a life in America as these people's lost son. And he goes, and the family accepts them. So there you have something strange and then you have an even stranger thing in the reaction. And then an investigator's brought into this whole thing and he assumes the only reason why the family would have accepted him as a son would be because they were actually aware of what happened to the original sign in the first place.
[00:18:02] And the film actually ends with the guy, the investigator digging up the backyard, trying to find the bones. That's what I'm talking about. The reaction of people is sometimes far more interesting than the thing itself. So that's a philosophy that I use.
[00:18:18] Matty: I think I would be irritated if the story ended with them digging up the yard.
[00:18:25] Ran: Yeah, but the thing is that you arrive at this very horrifying conclusion, and you know, he's probably not going to find anything there, but all of a sudden, the focus that we had on this imposter coming in is now shifted to the family and what their involvement might've been. It becomes a true crime story of a different type. Yeah. I definitely liked that.
[00:18:53] Matty: You had mentioned the fact that, the story read had, the word that could be pronounced "teers" or as "tares." Is wordplay more important in micro fiction than in longer fiction, do you think?
[00:19:07] Ran: Yeah, I would think so because you have fewer words to deal with, so every word matters that much. So if you only have a hundred words, you have to answer the question yourself as the writer, should I possibly include a little bit of alliteration here, or maybe a little assonance or some poetic techniques that you wouldn't really be able to do the longer piece, because it would get buried in a much larger narrative, but here you can do it in different ways.
[00:19:36] I like to think of drabbles as the kind of fiction that poets would, just as much as people who, enjoy short fiction. So, yeah, I use it as an opportunity to play around with things. Not to be heavy handed with it, but you know, like a sprinkle of paprika.
[00:20:22] Matty: So how do you distinguish between something like a drabble, the 100-word story, and poetry?
[00:20:29] Ran: So there's a very fine line there and I've actually come to this conclusion. And I think that Nancy Stoltman, she's a really major player in the micro fiction space, she kind of alluded to this and I agree with it that a lot of times people will call it whatever you name it. So something could be very much, in your mind, a poem, but if you call it something other than a poem, then they will accept that. The book that I had the award for, DAYKEEPER, that won an award for being a novel, but that novel was only 160 pages, so it's really more of a novella. But if I call it a novel, everyone else calls it a novel. And a lot of times it's just a matter of what you choose to call it.
[00:21:22] Another thing too, and I know that people who are really sticklers about this will say that there needs to be some evidence that a story is taking place, even if you're finishing the story in your head or beginning the story in your head, it needs to be evidence that there's some type of a movement with the characters. But at the same time you have prose poems that are narrative poems where that happens. So I guess it boils down to the individual and how they choose to think about it themselves as the artists and how they choose to present it to the world.
[00:21:52] I just wrote a piece for a friend of mine. He's doing a collection of superhero poems, and I wrote a 100-word story that I'm calling a poem. And I've stretched it so that it looks that way and that it feels that way and that it reads that way, but that I can still use it for my own fiction collection later on.
[00:22:16] And another writer who does this very well is a writer from Mississippi, my home state, her name is Beth Ann Fennelly, the Poet Laureate of Mississippi, she teaches at Ole Miss. She did a memoir called HEATING AND COOLING and it's basically micro nonfiction. But at least a quarter of the pieces in the collection were published in poetry journals before they were put in the micro memoir book. So she was able to see the duality of the pieces and treat them as such. So that would be the way I would suggest to people to consider it.
[00:22:50] Ran: I think that Dinty Moore has been doing brevity for quite a bit. You can see examples of people writing micro memoirs. You would approach it, probably, I'm guessing, the same way you would approach fiction. Figure out what the story is, what the space is you're trying to communicate. And once you start involving point of view and dealing with the narrative structure that we would use in fiction, it pretty much reads very similarly to fiction. So I think there's definitely space there for people to create something that's unique in that space.
[00:23:22] Matty: How long does it take you to write and complete a 100-word story?
[00:23:27] Ran: Hmm. That's an interesting question. I think it's more about the idea. So I'm a lawyer. I've been a lawyer for a long time, although I don't actively practice. My father was a lawyer for 47 years, recently retired. And one of the things he would say is that a lot of my job is thinking about things. I mean, literally thinking. Like he would be sitting at his desk like this. Like, are you working? Yes. I'm deep in thought and when I'm ready, I act. So I treat it very similarly with my own writing.
[00:24:01] And I will say this. Some days I don't write anything. And other days I'll write five stories. Like this morning I got up and I had like really three different ideas. So what I did was just wrote the first sentence of each idea. And then when I'm ready, I come back and just finish that off. I can give you an example too, being it is so recent. So this morning I got up and I thought about a friend of mine, before he got married, he went to Pamplona, Spain and ran with the bulls. I thought about that.
[00:24:38] And then I thought about, you know, there's a show called HOT ONES. It's on YouTube where people eat really spicy hot wings and the Scoville rating goes up exponentially with each wing that they eat. And then the whole thing is, can you finish the entire row of wings.
[00:24:55] And then I thought about Barack Obama when he was dating Michelle Obama and he had this car that was so old and raggedy that the floor was worn out and you could see the street while you're driving.
[00:25:09] And so I just jotted those things down. And before I knew it, I'd written a story called THE BULLS, and I can share it with you, a draft of it. I'm still working on it. It's called THE BULLS.
Shortly before everything went to shit, and I'm sorry if I'm offending any of your listeners, Tommy traveled to Pamplona, Spain, to run with the bulls. It had been an item on his bucket list for quite some time, and he’d convinced himself it was time to stop putting it off.
He’d never ridden an adrenaline wave so strong, trying to outrun the heavy slapping of hooves against cobblestone, as people yelled in admiration and fear.
When the days of the pandemic wore on, he would remember the moment he ran so fast he couldn’t feel his legs beneath him and know that he’d survived before and would survive again.
[00:26:07] So that's one I actually wrote shortly before we went live with this conversation.
[00:26:13] Matty: So in that case, a very short amount of time between that noodling on the idea and committing it to electronic paper. Do you feel like that's quite close to being finalized? Or what is your editing process like for these a 100-word stories?
[00:26:27] Ran: So I would look at it and ask myself, do I really want to use the four-letter word? Is it the most effective word? Cause I think about this. If you're going to put a word in there like that, it has to be the right word. I'm not a person who believes that you avoid certain words because you lack the vocabulary to express yourself adequately. I just think that each word has a particular emotional effect upon the reader. So I want to think about that word. I want to think about whether or not I wanted to create a little bit more in terms of the environment of running with the bulls. Cause right now I have "the heavy slapping of hooves against cobblestone." And then I want to see if I want to keep the pandemic component there because there's so much about the pandemic that we're still dealing with and that may or may not be the best turn in the story.
[00:27:17] So yeah, I would look at it and sleep on it and come back to it, poke and prod at it. Change a thing here, let it breathe, change a thing there. Always cognizant of the word count. Cause sometimes you get an idea. Okay, I'm going to do away with the third paragraph altogether, so that gives me back 25 words. How do I make this story even better with those 25 words? So that's how I approach it.
[00:27:43] Matty: Is there a period of time where you have to set it aside before you can go back and look at it with fresh eyes?
[00:27:50] Ran: You know, that's a really good question. I can't say there's a particular amount of time. I think it's more like a mood. I read so many things and I consume so much media. And I think about so many different things. So when I returned to it, it used to take me a while. It used to take me weeks of separation from something to look at it objectively. But because I teach and I write and I read so much, it's very easy to cleanse my palate of the story. And I can return to it in a couple of hours and see it in a very different light. But that's because I've trained and conditioned myself to do that. Plus it's only a hundred words, so it's much easier to do it that way than it is if you were writing something that was 60,000 words.
[00:28:31] Matty: Right. I remember, a friend of mine and I were goofing around on a chat, and we had this idea for the 100-word story, but we had to do it in three minutes or something like that. And I remember I had some reference to the person comes from Philadelphia. And I ended up with 99 words. So I changed him to coming from New York because that rounded out the number. The other dilemma I had was that I had a reference to a four-poster bed in this one that I'm just working on now, and I had to look up whether that was hyphenated or not. And then whether Word would count that as one word or two words. It's very finicky.
[00:29:11] Ran: I tend to look at all hyphenated words as one word.
[00:29:14] Matty: Yeah, I think Word agrees with you.
[00:29:15] Ran: It's interesting you say that cause I've done the same thing. Sometimes it's a matter of how you say a particular name. Maybe I had a name that was a first and last name and it was pushing me to 101. How important is the last name here? And then you take the last name off and then you fall in word count. So yes, a lot of that manipulation goes on. And the thing about it, the final reader has no idea that you even played around with it that way, but you know what you had to cut to get to that point.
[00:29:44] Matty: it was funny when Mark and I originally came up with this idea for the thing for the webinar, we had said a hundred words, including title and the author name. And then I read your article and I saw that it explicitly excludes title and author name, so I proposed to Mark that we changed that, which gave me six extra words. It's like, this is so exciting. I have six extra words to work with.
[00:30:06] I also saw that in an interview you did with Jane Friedman, you mentioned that you are also interested in songwriting. Did I get that right?
[00:30:14] Ran: Well, I used to write songs back in the day. I'm more of a micro fiction writer at this point. But it was a part of the history of getting to where I am.
[00:30:22] Matty: Is that ever something that you want to return to? Because I can imagine that writing lyrics is very much like writing micro fiction.
[00:30:29] Ran: Honestly, I haven't really thought about it. I was doing a lot of rhythm and blues and so many of the songs in rhythm and blues are based around love. And there's only so many different ways you can tell that story before it just becomes cliche city. If I did return to music, it probably would be lyricless music, more instrumental things. I've been listening to a lot of jazz lately and I'm getting ideas in that space, but I try to channel that into the writing.
[00:30:55] Matty: Do you listen to music while you write the micro fiction?
[00:30:59] Ran: Sometimes. Yeah, some stories are directly inspired by the songs I listen to where others are not. But the easiest thing for me to do is just put on some jazz, particularly like a piano trio, where it's just a piano, the drummer, and upright bass, something mellow in the background, and then find the idea, hook into the idea and build around it.
[00:31:22] Matty: Describe a little bit your evolution from novel length works to the micro fiction as a lead-in to, is it something that you would go back and forth between, or do you feel like you're kind of for the time being on the micro fiction route and that's where you plan to be for a while?
[00:31:36] Ran: Oh, that's a very good question. So I started writing novels because that's what everybody said that you had to write in order to be successful. And I wrote several of them. And it takes time to write a novel and you have to kind of sometimes go into spaces that you hadn't originally anticipated in order to create enough of a word count to justify it being called a novel.
[00:32:00] When given the choice, I started shifting towards novellas and short stories and it got to a point where everything I was writing was getting shorter and shorter. And when I learned about flash fiction, I started writing flash fiction. And then when I learned about micro fiction, I started writing micro fiction.
[00:32:20] Now that I've been writing micro fiction exclusively since 2018, I've started playing around with something very different. In fact, my next book, which comes out in October is a book in which I use 100 100-word chapters to tell a complete novel or narrative arc. And the book is called A BURST OF GRAY. And I don't think that's been done before. I know there are things called novellas in flash. Nancy Stohlman created something called a flash novel. But each of my chapters are 100-words each to the T. And the entire story is told over the course of 100 of those.
[00:33:04] And like I said, I don't think has been done before. I started to give a name to it. But then I realized that marketing wise people won't really know what that is unless you tell them. So rather than say like A BURST OF GRAY: A Micro Novel, I called it A BURST OF GRAY: A Novel in 100-word Stories. That way people will know immediately what it is upfront and not have to read a prologue that I've written explaining the science behind the form.
[00:33:31] I figured that there are plenty of other spaces you can write articles about what you're doing. But it was definitely inspired by what people have been doing before with both the flash novel and novella flash. But that's how I tend to treat novel ideas that I have now. Use the form that I'm working with and try to do new things with it, create novellas with it, create novelettes with it.
[00:33:53] I think about Stephen King's book, DIFFERENT SEASONS, where you have the novellas for each of the seasons. Maybe doing 25 100-word stories that are part of a larger narrative arc and then stacking them against each other. So, yeah, there are a lot of things that I would love to try with this that have never been done. And that's how I'm choosing to marry the two ideas.
[00:34:16] Matty: I wanted to use that as a chance to segue from the craft side to the business side, because I'd be curious as to your thoughts about, if people are intrigued with this, they're working on their a hundred-word stories, what are some of the routes they can take to get those into the hands of readers?
[00:34:35] Ran: You can always submit to different places. There are lots of competitions that are out there. A lot of them do require that you pay a fee to enter the competition. I think my biggest concern with that, I won't call it an issue, I'll call it a concern, is that the requirements for submission often times don't fit what I'm doing.
[00:34:57] For example, if it's micro fiction that they're accepting, a collection of micro fiction, they normally have a page count. Like, you know, 150 pages. Like I just gave you a hundred stories and those hundred stories exists on a hundred pages. So I don't have 150 pages. Or maybe they want you to give them a hundred pages, but they want it to be 22,000 words or more. And I'm like, no, it's 10,000 words. The math is really easy.
[00:35:24] And I ended up not being able to fit the bill for a lot of competitions going on. So the question then is, well, what do you do then? One thing you can do is disguise, I know this sounds really bad, but disguise your collection as a collection of poems, because that would work. You know, people are used to seeing a collection of poems that are 50 to 70 pages. If you can find someone who's willing to look at the poetic aspects of your work and treat it as such, even if it is called a story.
[00:35:55] The other thing, the thing that I particularly enjoy, is just doing it myself. I think over the years I've built up a skill set and gradually a platform that allows me to do these things myself without really worrying about how other people would deal with them. Because it's not about them liking the stories. It's about me selling them on the form. So I have a two-part job. I have to convince him that 100-word stories actually have value. And then that mine are actually good enough to be published. That's two steps.
[00:36:29] And what I've chosen to do is just submit the individual stories to different journals to get them published. And then when it comes time for the collection, then do the collection myself. And it has worked out very well so far, and I'm likely to keep doing it, although I'm not closing off the opportunity to work with a more traditional publishers in the process.
[00:36:50] Matty: When you have a new book available, what routes do you take to alert people that it's out there? Do you do ads, do you do in person events when that's available? Virtual events?
[00:37:01] Ran: Good question. So I've done a little bit of all of those things, but the most effective thing for me is actually doing events, talking with people.
[00:37:10] I remember when Bill Clinton ran for president in 92, a lot of people voted for him because they had actually met him. He was the only candidate that actually shaken hands with. And so for me, you keep an understanding that your sales will be modest because you're in an area where sales are modest. But you want to meet as many different people, evangelize for the form as much as possible, and then just gradually grow your readership from a grassroots level.
[00:37:37] So I enjoy talking to people. I enjoy doing interviews. I enjoy speaking with classes and enjoy teaching classes and talking about things. I have a few events coming up this fall. And then of course, a lot of things I do with WRITER'S DIGEST actually allow me to reach a larger group of people as well.
[00:37:56] But it's a process. It's different. You have to find something that works for you. And do you do whatever you have access to or what makes the most sense at the time. But one of the things that to me yields the greatest results is just being able to meet and interact with people. I think if people actually see you and what you're doing, then they're more likely to take a chance on you and your work.
[00:38:17] Matty: Are those events focused around bookstores and libraries primarily?
[00:38:22] Ran: Very good question there. So with bookstores, not so much. I've done a few bookstores in the past, but I love libraries. I think that libraries are the secret sauce to the whole thing. If you think about this, if you're a person who is an indy writer and you're looking for a place to go and do a reading, a place to do a signing, a place to do a talk, because they're always really good with community engagement. And figure out a way to tie your book into something larger that would help the community.
[00:38:55] I live in Hampton, Virginia, and I believe there four, I think four or five branches to our library here. I could hit up each of those then go to Newport News, which is literally one mile away, and they have five libraries. And I could spend the entire year and not get beyond 150 miles of my house and still meet new people, express new ideas, sell books, become ingrained in the community that supports me. I think it's an amazing thing, to use libraries that way, plus libraries actually have income or they have money in their budgets set up to buy books.
[00:39:36] A lot of times we would go places like with bookstores, they'll carry it. It will sit on the shelf with 30,000 other books. And unless somebody knows specifically to come to that section and look for your book, it might get returned to some point. Whereas librarians, once they know you and they buy into what you're doing, they will purchase your books. And that's an ongoing thing. And then if you look at the numbers and the studies have been done around people checking out books from the library, a lot of times those people will go and buy not only subsequent books from the author, but sometimes that book that they checked out as well.
[00:40:13] So it's a different way of getting known, and it's a wonderful network that you can tap into that doesn't require you to have to go and haggle with anybody, or okay, now your stuff was done over here, so we have to figure out how we want to ring this up and if you don't sell out of what they have there in stock and all of it's going back. And then would have various it's different thing. And you can bring in your own books and sell. So it's a lot of different things you can do with them. And they're the best curators, in my opinion, for books and they have that relationship with the community that's to me a lot more authentic.
[00:40:48] And in many cases, the closest bookstore to me is Barnes and Noble. So if you have a local bookstore that you feel comfortable with, that you can have that relationship with, I would definitely create that. But at the same time, do not neglect the library because they will be talking about your book everywhere they go. And they are a very connected group of people. So it's a very wonderful thing to be on their lips as they're talking about what they're enjoying reading.
[00:41:15] Matty: Yeah, whenever I got the opportunity, I know some listeners will groan that I'm saying it again, but whenever I get the opportunity, I always like to emphasize, as you are, the business benefits as well as the community benefits of libraries and the fact that you can charge more, libraries are willing to pay more for an ebook, for example, than a one-time customer would. So I sell my eBooks, where they would be 4.99 normally on retail platforms, the library price is 29.99, which is still much cheaper than if they were buying a comparable A list bestseller book.
[00:41:46] Ran: And the problem that they have for years. But yeah, that was a really big headache where they would embargo books and then charge way too much for something. It's digital. So to control the number digitally. You're kind of forcing things into a box where a box doesn't really exist, but you're telling people that it does.
[00:42:05] Now for indy writers there's The Indie Author Project, and they're really good with this because they do curate independent books, but they will get them into libraries. And they have this system where, when people check out, it's unlimited checkouts, which is something very different than what the Big Five were doing. You know, you're paying $89, but you get what two on that, two checkouts on that.
[00:42:32] And so it's a way to get into that system. And I think a lot of librarians are really interested in trying to find the best way economically to engage with authors and still be able to serve their customer base. But I like what you said about that, you get to charge a library of price, but your price is still miles away from John Grisham. You know, John Grisham's books are going to be very expensive for the library. And they have to buy several of those licenses just because of the demand. So yeah, that's definitely a place where Indies have a chance to really shine.
[00:43:10] Matty: And some libraries also will pay speaker fees, you're never going to get a speaker fee at a bookstore, so that's another income opportunity. And I really like the idea of what you were saying about sometimes when people check a book out of the library, then they want to purchase it. And I would think that would be especially true for things like collections of short stories or collections of micro fiction, because unlike a novel where you check it out, you read through it, and you return it. You know, off and done with it. those kinds of books are ones, in my case anyway, that I like to read a little bit and then I like to put it aside and then a month later I'll think, oh, I really liked this story. I want to go back and reread it. So it's the kind of thing that I want it in my library, I don't want to be checking it in and out and having the library checkout be the entree to sales, as you're saying.
[00:43:56] So the last thing I wanted to ask you about is when I was on your website, there is a page in French. Can you give us some background on that?
[00:44:04] Ran: Sometimes you just get lucky. And I don't know if it was Churchill who said about preparation meets opportunity. So I had a book, a blues novel that I'd written. My agent at the time did not really care much for the book. So much so that she never acknowledged receipt of the manuscript. And she finally said, well, you knew that wasn't going to sell so I don't know why you sent it to me expecting me to respond. And I was like, oh, okay.
[00:44:35] So I decided to go ahead and self-publish it. And I self-published it and nothing happened. A handful of American sales and that was it. I did end up making a friend who is a writer who lives in England. His name is Richard Walls. And he had just come back from Clarksdale, Mississippi, which is where the story is set, although I use a fictional name. And it hit him in such a way that he wrote to me, and we developed a very strong relationship with each other and he's still a very close writer friend of mine to this day.
[00:45:09] But then something else strange happened. I got an email from this guy in France, and he was like, do you have the French rights to your story? And I'm like, I self-publish. I have all the rights to my story. And he was like, I'd be interested in translating your work. And I was like, huh, this is just like that Nigerian prince trying to get money out of the account.
[00:45:33] And so I had to go and check him out and I looked his name up online and saw that he had translated works for Janet Evanovich and a whole string of best-selling authors. And I was like, how in the world did he even find my book? And so I say, yes, you can translate it. Fine. Cool. And he asked me, do you mind if I shop the book to different publishers, because I have good relationship with the publishers here. And I was like, have at it. I mean, I had done everything that I planned to do with the book. The book was out there, and it was just done.
[00:46:06] And he found a publisher for it. And they were like, we really want to publish the book. And it was Éditions Autrement. It's a smaller publisher but it's under a larger publishing company. And I was curious, I'm like, why? Because after we got into negotiations, I was like, what is it about this book that's fascinating to you? And at the time I was speaking with the executive director of the publishing house, and she started saying, well, that does this, that, and the other. It sounded like she was talking about Toni Morrison's books, not my book. Really? And you know, the whole time, just like, yes, I'm going to sign this deal, but I'm just like, what in the world is happening here? I feel like I just stepped into the Twilight Zone.
[00:46:54] So I sign the deal. The book came out, got great reviews. Afterwards another editor ended up coming to the publishing house and she was trying to find books that she believed in that during the first round didn't necessarily have the sales that they deserved, so she created the Great Novels Collection and republished it. And it had a second life over there and I had absolutely nothing to do with it. I've never been to France. I speak only that much French. And it's managed to find a life of its own. I'm always fascinated when people discover the book and then write to me from France about it saying that my English is not very good, but I read your book and I think it's great. And it is just, it's amazing.
[00:47:48] And it's something that just totally happened out of nowhere. But I'm very grateful to the French readers, both in France and in Canada, who have latched onto that book. And it's just been another wonderful experience in this whole indy process.
[00:48:10] Matty: Well, congratulations to you on that and what a lovely note to end on. Thank you so much, Ram. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all your work online.
[00:48:20] Ran: My website, which is RanWalker.com. And I'm only on Twitter. Well, I am on LinkedIn, but Twitter is @RanWalker and, yeah, those are the places you can find me.
[00:48:35] And I really appreciate you inviting me on your show, Matty. I've really enjoyed it.
[00:48:40] Matty: It's been a pleasure. Thank you for talking with me.
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