I see this kind of thing a lot in the slush these days. The author eschews the actual story, and instead paints us an elaborate picture of what happened after the action. Obviously, this is common in flash, because often the inciting incident cannot be written in few enough words to qualify as flash.

We’ve published a few of these kinds of pieces, but often they just don’t work. There’s an insidious little trap that authors seem to fall into with regularity, and it is this: “When writing an aftermath piece, the situation described must be more interesting or powerful than the inciting incident”. Otherwise, the whole time you audience is reading the story they’re thinking, “wow that would have been cool to read about”.

To use a real life example, imagine you arrived at an intersection. Firefighters are hosing away stains on the street and you can just see a tow truck driving away towing something you just can’t make out. You ask a bystander what happened and he goes nuts, “Holy cow, I can’t believe you missed it! There was this wild elephant chasing a peanut truck and it ran into a wig factory and there was hair EVERYWHERE!”

You’d feel a little disappointed that you’d missed the action wouldn’t you? In an aftermath story, you’re going to have to overcome that with your readers.

How do you overcome it? Well, that’s really market dependent. In some markets (usually pulp markets) if your inciting incident was a bullets blazing, fist shaking brawl, you’ll never be able to overcome reader disappointment. They’ll want to read about that fight. However, if you’re targeting a literary market, they’re much more concerned with the emotional impact that that kind of violence would have. Give them a little angst and heartbreak, and they’re much more likely to forgive you for skipping the action.

Once again, it comes down to effective story placement. Know your market, and you just might be one of the ones who can pull off a perfect aftermath story.

Tags: The craft