Hypertext Magazine asked KB Jensen, author of Love and Other Monsters in the Dark, “Considering you’ve written two novels, why did you choose to use the language of short stories and flash for your latest book, Love and Other Monsters in the Dark?”
By KB Jensen
My work keeps getting shorter and shorter. I’ve always been a tight writer. I was a journalist, after all, before I turned to a life of publishing. My first book, Painting With Fire, was a crime novel. My second, A Storm of Stories, was an experimental, literary novel with two people trapped in a car during a snowstorm telling each other stories as a way to survive. My latest book, Love and Other Monsters in the Dark, is mostly flash and micro flash, anchored by some longer stories, about monsters and the horrors of everyday love. I suspect my next book could be even shorter, tugging at the intersection of micro flash and poetry.
Why is my writer’s brain taking my writing smaller and smaller? To be honest, I’m not entirely in control. I tend to write from the subconscious mind, like dreaming on paper. I’m always surprised by what lands on a page when I open my documents and start playing the computer keys. I love to genre hop. Part of it is that I love a challenge and I refuse to be tied down or pigeonholed into any one genre or form.
That said, the short story form is appealing to me in that it’s harder to write than a novel in many ways. I know many writers start with short stories and I did, as well during creative writing classes. While they may be easier to workshop, I do actually believe short stories are more difficult to pull off. The shorter they are, the harder they are. How do you develop characters in less than 500 words and have a real ending? How do you get a collection to hang together thematically? Novels are like puzzles, but stories are especially so because every single, tiny piece has to mean something. Every word is valuable real estate and has to offer revealing detail. In a novel, you have room to explore and breathe, and discover and develop. You may cut it later with a novel, but every little line has to sing in a story. In short stories, you have to have extreme discipline. With a novel, you might ask every page, every paragraph, do I need this? With flash, it’s every single word. There’s no time—no breathing room in flash. No room for error. That’s exciting to me as an artist.
I also enjoy the lack of commitment with a short story. Sometimes when I start a project, I think, do I like this character enough to spend a few years with them? And I panic. I have to trick myself into writing a novel. My crime novel actually started as poem, morphed into a short story and then just built up into a novel over time, with countless revisions. With a short story, you don’t have to enter a long-term relationship with your characters.
I’ve been writing short stories and flash for a long time, but I’ve become more in love with the form over time. In 2018, I went to a life-changing writing retreat in Casperia, Italy, with two flash queens, authors Nancy Stohlman and Kathy Fish. I became even more passionate and inspired about the flash form. Just seeing the ways they and other writers distill things down was exciting to me. The words become even more powerful—the stories even more powerful. It’s counterintuitive. You think you have to add, to develop more, but you don’t. Sometimes you just need to strip.
Related Feature: Excerpt: KB Jensen’s LOVE AND OTHER MONSTERS IN THE DARK
Award-winning Author K.B. Jensen’s new collection of short stories, Love and Other Monsters in the Dark, will be published July 2022. She has two novels, Painting With Fire, an artistic murder mystery, and A Storm of Stories, which veers literary and handles love, craziness and impossibility. Painting With Fire has been downloaded over 75,000 times. K.B. lives in Littleton, CO., with her family. She teaches skiing and writes poetry. A former journalist, K.B. is a senior publishing consultant and writing camp director for My Word Publishing. Her work has appeared in Cherry Magazine, Progenitor and other publications. Visit www.kbjensenauthor.com. (Photo Credit: Kelly Weaver Photography)