“This is hilarious. You should write it up as a flash essay.”
This was the note that I got from one of my editors. She had embarrased herself by bemoaning a family situation with me. I told her not to worry. The situation was all too familiar. She wasn’t sure she believed me so, as any writer would do, I illustrated my point.
I told her that I’d think about it but essays don’t really do it for me. I love the form but I’m good at writing short. The last time I looked at essay markets, I nearly fainted. “The average length of the essays we purchase is 5000 words.” “15,000 words.” “Up to 10,000 words.”
Help! I write short. It’s what I do.
But I know flash fiction is short so I decided to look into flash essays. One market listed 1000 words. Another 350.
350 – 1000 words. That is something I could most likely handle so I started looking for information on flash essays.
- Also known as a micro-essay.
- A flash essay is written in first person.
- They generally only have room for an anecdote or two.
- It goes beyond personal narrative, pulling in ideas and data that broaden the scope of the piece.
A flash essay is to essays what a sparkler is to fireworks. Short, intense, and wonderful.
A great way to get a feel for a type of writing is to read it. Two places that you can go to check them out are The Christian Science Monitor’s Home Forum and concīs. Why only two? It seems like a lot of the places that publish essays charge reading fees. Me? If you have to pay for them to read it, that’s not a market. That’s a service. If, on the other hand, they read it without charging you and then pay you even a small amount. That’s a market and, at least in my mind, will attract a very different type of material.
Obviously, I’ve got some research and writing to do if I’m going to make this flash-essay thing work.
–SueBE
Side Bars: Bite-Sized Chunks of Info
Tags: rewriting, sidebars, writing from an editor's comments
I’d love to say that I finished a whole chapter today. That would sound really impressive. And I thought I would manage to pull it off when I saw how few comments my editor had on my chapter. Seven. You should be able to pop through seven comments lickety split.
Sidebar from The Ancient Maya.
Pfft. What I hadn’t realized was that one of them was a “big comment.”
Little comments are things like:
Double check this fact.
What country is this in?
Make sure this word is in the glossary.
Big comments take a lot more effort to address. Big comments are on this scale:
I’m not saying it should be here, but somewhere in the chapter/book, you need to address X.
Cut the preceding two paragraphs and expand on the ideas in this paragraph.
Make sure that your sidebars are spaced evenly throughout the chapter.
This particular comment was the last one. The one about sidebars.
For those of you who haven’t included sidebars in a manuscript, sidebars are those bite-sized write-ups that provide just a bit more information about something in the chapter, article or book. A sidebar is offset from the rest of the text often by a box, title, different font, or background color. This sort of thing is handled by whoever does the interior book design.
Within the manuscript, a sidebar includes a title and is double-spaced. It looks a lot like the surrounding text. When I write for Red Line, I set sidebars off by including SB: at the beginning of the title. The one above would have been SB: Jade. I also have a fairly tight word count that I need to stay within when I include sidebars. On my current project there are two sidebar lengths. Short are less than 100 words. Long are 150 to 200 words.
The hardest part? The part that took me so much time today? When there are multiple sidebars in a chapter, I need to make sure that they are spaced, more or less, evenly from beginning to end. When there are four, they don’t have to be at the 1/4 mark, 1/2 way, at the 3/4, and at the end. But most of them can’t be bunched up at the beginning of the chapter either. When they are, you may have to fold one into the main text and come up with another.
It may not take long to write an individual sidebar, but making sure you have them dispersed correctly is another thing altogether.
–SueBE
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