For years now I’ve been following Bojana Stojcic whose work has been published in a whole slew of online magazines. Recently she pulled together a collection of her short short and flash fiction pieces for DarkWinter Press, an independent publishing company located in Ontario Canada that wants “your weird, your traditional with a twist, your humour, your dark thoughts, or your elation. We’re open to anything—just make it interesting. Make us think.” They certainly hit the ball out of the park with Bojana. Her work does all of those things.

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Jan: Thank you for stopping by for tea to discuss your new book! I must say, you look divine. Not at all the frazzled writer! As I was reading your book I kept thinking: this writer is a chameleon who’s not going to let readers pigeon hole her work. At times, wise and witty (“today I am a future pile of dust like you.”) and at other times raw to the bone (“I need evidence that I’m alive.”) Is there a writer with whom you most identify?

Bojana: There are a lot of writers I look up to but, rather than identifying with any particular writer, what matters more to me is to identify as one. Writing doesn’t come easily to me. I know some people who write prolifically, whether it be essays or blog posts or poetry. I’m not one of them, although that doesn’t stop me from wondering what specific mindset allows someone to write that much. Then I find comfort in the thought that fiction requires a somewhat different approach. An author summed up writing fiction beautifully: the first draft is like getting lost in the woods, editing is your map and revision finding your way back out. And, to quote Robert Frost, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.” It’s easy to get lost in them.

Writing means observing, listening, reflecting. It also means research and regularity. Most importantly, to be a writer, you have to read like one, which is precisely what I do. As someone who is more curious about how than wow, I analyze instead of getting lost in the story. I study characters thoroughly, reread interesting dialogues, monologues and descriptions, I pay attention to the sentence structure. Finally, I contemplate the word choice to better understand the motivations and conflicts. I need to think long and hard about every single detail, always keeping in mind the emotion I’d like to provoke. I need my readers to feel the horror, envy, anger. I want them to grieve with my protagonists, to ache with them, to be equally disgusted or brokenhearted or utterly apathetic and withdrawn. Like in real life. It’s easy to judge. What’s way harder is to understand someone’s reluctance to make any effort to change or improve things. To show compassion and a willingness to believe that choosing pain doesn’t always mean making the wrong choice.

Jan: Is there an example of what you mean in one of your stories?

Bojana: Yes. In Once You Have a Duvet, You’ll Be Fine

You begin to feel it at a young age; your body gives you signs so you damage it once, you damage it twice, too many times to remember. Because you don't know a better way to cope. Roll with it, they say, like a ship in a storm. I wish I could say, I tried but it didn't work. Truth is, I didn't. Like a letter thrown into the fire,I darkened and curled before bursting into flames.

Jan: You hear a lot about flash fiction these days, but how is it different from short stories and does the genre have anything to do with the title of your book? You know, knives cutting like editors editing?

Bojana: For the record, I came up with the recurring knives and blades symbolism after I’d written at least a dozen stories, when I realized I could be actually working on a book. The thing is, I needed a strong metaphor, some sort of a unifying idea which would put together seemingly dissimilar things and, since I’m a huge fan of everything chilling and eerie in storytelling, blades seemed like a good choice, as they only further stressed the emotional turmoil and expectations the protagonists had to cope with.

Back to flash fiction which is actually a shorter version of a short story, its length normally not exceeding 1,000 words. Plenty of editors/publishers are pretty specific about publishing one, but not necessarily the other, which is why I like to call Knives All Blade a collection of short stories and flash fiction. Let’s put it this way: flash fiction tries to tell big, rich, complex stories quickly and concisely, each word carefully chosen to convey emotion and atmosphere. For me, telling a story compressed into limited language, without wasting time or space, is what’s most challenging about it.

One of the keys to flash fiction is a sense of urgency. The point is to start in medias res, to throw readers right into the thick of it. This creates a sense of immediacy and helps build tension, as it raises questions that readers will be able to answer only if they go on reading. I enjoy writing intense, gripping stories, pulling readers by the heart without releasing tension from the beginning to that climax, every scene compelling them to hold their breath or stop breathing altogether. It’s a process. It takes time to learn the ropes. To learn how to build tension and when to slow things down, how to effectively use a mix of long and short sentences to communicate the protagonists’ thoughts and feelings, how to surprise the reader, write a story that inverts themes.

Jan: Can you give us an example of what you mean by sense of urgency and stories that invert themes?

Bojana: Here’s an example of urgency from Life to the Throat

A knife will always manage to surprise you, like your period," I told my little girl, giving her one as a gift when she started bleeding. "That blood running prepares you for pregnancy. Learn how to use it."

I wish I'd had one. I was so confused.

Regarding “inverts themes” that would be hard, if not impossible, to name an example here because the twist/resolution happens literally in the very end, so you’d have to know the whole story to understand. A good example would be Beyond the Ditches when you come to realize it’s not a story about the challenges of being a mother, but about childlessness. (It was all in her mind, making up the kid as either a copying mechanism or impact of trauma.) Or, say How to Skin a Dogfish when zio Luigi becomes a likely murderer and we see that K is actually a parrot, not a child. Or maybe Once You Have a Duvet … again.

Unknown to her, a letter arrived from court in late January, saying an eviction order had been placed on the house, that she had seven days to leave the property. Her husband stopped paying the mortgage, full of surprises as ever. All the while she waited for him under a tree, blossom-fringed branches bowing toward the ground, as if begging for forgiveness. Waited with bated breath to say I tried so hard to stop the situation getting this far, to see what he would say about her leaving him.

Flash fiction isn’t plot-heavy, thank god. It’s all about capturing moments, and sparking the imagination, which enabled me to put more emphasis on character development. That being said, each story required a different approach. And yes, some were definitely more difficult to tell than the others. It wasn’t always easy to translate all those images and ideas into actual words that carried a story along. That’s something I had to learn as well. To stop fretting about details or editing every little thing. The first draft is ugly for a reason.

There’s more to it, of course. If I didn’t know enough about a subject, for example, I would do research, go back to reading. Slowly and critically. This also included reading relevant books, news, articles, blogs, etc, as well as essays on human behavior to better understand personality development and create believable stories and layered characters that the reader can relate to. Writers need to understand people because we write for people, about people.

Jan: Yes indeed. Thanks for stopping by and spending some time with me. I hope that Knives All Blade will get the widespread attention it deserves.

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Lovely Readers, I know many of you write flash fiction, do you have any questions for Bojana?