I wake up. I crawl out from under my night's domicile, a bush high up in Griffith Park. My clothes are damp from the night's dewfall, but no matter: they will dry as I walk. The sun is up, low over the city. The smog turns it the color of old blood, rusty blood, like you might find on the rusty carcass of . . . let's say a 49 Chevy. Or maybe . . . the color of a dead body's face, lying on its back in a land fill. The body is bloated, decaying, staring up into the hot sun, not noticing its slow, constant, sunburn. Why am I thinking those kinds of thoughts? No need for that. I am not a dead body-not yet anyhow. Walking down the hill toward the planetarium, I can feel the night's cold in my bones. But soon I start to loosen up. I am almost a young man again, not nearly as old as I was twenty minutes ago. This may turn out to be a nice day after all.

He walks, thinking. Heidegger says it is the end of philosophy. Derrida disagrees. Reality has to do with a state of being, nothing else. Does that mean it is the end of everything?

Seagulls circle overhead. Why are they here? I'm miles from the ocean.

He walks, wondering. Heidegger says it is the end of philosophy. Derrida disagrees. Reality has to do with a state of being, nothing else. Does that mean it is the end of everything?

I once slept under a tree on a mountainside. Far below was a landfill. There were seagulls there too, circling, looking for a snack. How did they get from the ocean to that landfill? Did they discuss it? What say we fly up and check out the landfill? Maybe there's is a dead body there to snack on. They take off, heading for the mountains. Last one there is a rotten turtle egg.

He walks, doubting all, even his own sanity. Derrida's two notions, difference and deference, separate self identity from the false reality of time. Does it mean everything is temporary?

I don't live at the beach anymore. A pretty nice shelter out there in Santa Monica, but too noisy. People coming and going at all hours. Fights. I decided to leave. Go inland. Why did I end up living in a homeless shelter? Not my fault that I flunked out first semester. Lost my scholarship. Not my fault that Reagan got elected. Just bad luck. Who cares? Not me. So I live under a bush. It's not so bad. I can still visit the beach anytime I want to. Just get on a bus. Pretend to search my pockets for a transfer. I'm sure I had it here somewhere. Make it five or six blocks before the driver kicks me out. Sometimes they just say, Go sit down. Let you ride free. Not the women drivers though. Tough ladies those. No heart. Stop the bus right in the middle of the block. Toss you off. The bus drives away in a cloud of black smoke. Everybody stares out the window at you.

He walks, in wet shoes, thinking about sine waves. At any two discrete points along that wavy line there must be, by definition, a point between them. And so on - forever. How small can a point be? That's the hard part. How can an infinitely small point be measured without imparting the energy of the observation to it? Or is it energy? Maybe it's the observation itself. Maybe they don't like to be observed.

Take any point in time. Take any particular place in time. I could be not here. I could be walking on the beach. If I was a seagull, I could be watching myself down below, walking on the beach. Not here. I might see a girl, also walking alone, coming right toward me. She might sense my capabilities right off. Take a liking to me. Invite me to come live with her at her small, but comfortable, cottage only a stone's throw from the ocean.

As he walks, he posits a de facto situation. It could be a de jure truth. True at least for that moment in time. And being truth and therefore imbued with a kind of natural superiority, it is holy, beyond analysis. To put it another way, will he get the girl?

Posit A: he gets the girl. They are living at 1273-G Ocean Avenue. The G means there are seven cottages. They live in the seventh cottage from the ocean, Cottage G. She is pretty. Light brown hair. Thin. Thoughtful. She has a cat. The cat is named Trisha. The girl is named . . . not Trisha. Maybe . . . Lindsey. She is from a wealthy family in New Haven, Connecticut. She is on sabbatical, far away from family and friends, as far as you can get without wading. She wants to be a writer. She spends her days looking through the Beach Reader newspaper, looking for local writer's groups. She joins them, one after another. Pays her money. But never comes back after the first session.

She says they can sleep together, but no sex. No sex? No, we are above that. We are? Yes, we will have intellectual intercourse, but no crying afterwards. At night she feels warm and comfortable against him, his body perfectly conforming to hers, the cat unable to get between them. But it will try. It will be jealous, trying to push its way in, maybe even scratching, or biting to gets its own way. But a seagull will come down from the sky and carry it away. With the cat gone, the girl will be sad. But she will turn to him for solace. She will stop going to those useless writer's groups that take so much of her mind away from their relationship. She will learn to cook. She will stay with him forever, or at least for as long as he likes it.

He walks, wishing he could talk to Derrida again about these things. The old professor had given him only fifteen minutes, in his office, small, but with the nice view of the UCI campus. They spoke about maybe signing up for his class. Derrida didn't put him down, didn't think badly of him; it was just that the university had its rules. Derrida didn't even mind his theories, didn't even try to refute them, just softly suggested he might do a little more reading on the subject before positing them. Derrida didn't even think badly of his theory about Heidegger, the theory that Heidegger and his disciples hadn't escaped transcendentalism, even if they all pretended they had.

In the end, she left him. They always do. She was just gone, carried away with the wind. He walked up and down Ocean Avenue all day looking for her. There wasn't even a Cottage G anymore. She'd packed it all up and took it away with her. But the ocean was still there. He liked being close to the ocean. He liked the smell of the it, especially on foggy mornings when the tide is just going out.

Some have called it fiction for the TV generation, and, lately, fiction for the internet generation. But don't think that because they are very short they are easier to write. Getting the components of a good story (characterization, plot development, description) into a smaller space takes a special kind of skill.

Along with their new-found popularity, very short stories have taken on some new names. Robert Shapard and James Thomas edited three popular collections of very short fiction calling them "Sudden Fiction." (Sudden Fiction, Sudden Fiction International, and Sudden Fiction Continued). Very short fiction has also been called "flash fiction" or "minute fiction."

Let's say these very short pieces are supposed to include the usual beginning, middle, and end. How can that be done? Clearly, each element must be "compressed."

How do we "compress" a story? Let's say our short story has to at least have one or more characters. Therefore, we will probably need some character development. So it we develop a character, put our character in a scene, and show something happening, is that a story? Some would say: if it has plot, it is a story. We won't get into what constitutes "plot" here; for that you might want to take a look at some of the other session discussions in this series. It seems to me that this so-called "compressing" will often lead to telling the plot, rather than showing it. In other words, the author will have to set up the situation for the reader by telling the reader what he needs to know to understand the brief events that comprise the story. In fact, if you read a bunch of these very short stories, you will soon discover that many of them set up the situation, telling the reader what went before - and then the writer begins the action. The plot develops from there. There is often dialogue in these types of stories, because dialogue can be used to quickly carry the plot forward, and, at the same time, tell the reader more about the characters that are speaking.

In my quickly written example story, I mostly use character thought to develop both the scene and the character. That saves a lot of words. There are many other techniques, too many to go into in this short article, but you get the main idea: do the usual story development things, but find a way to do it quickly.

Be aware that the compact nature of these stories forces the author to write with great care: every word and its contribution to the purpose of the story must be examined. We believe writers should know far more about their story than they reveal to the readers. This is especially true for very short fiction: know your story and your characters and then find a way to "convey" it to the reader quickly. Most importantly, the writer must know, from the first word, where the reader is being led.

Perhaps the greatest danger of the short short story "genre" is that the writer will try to constrain a story that needs to be told in a more conventional way. The short short story is not merely an outline of a longer story. It has its own form and methods. Nevertheless, it can be an interesting writing exercise, a way to test your ability to quickly focus on character development and situation using an effeciency of word and style. Can you carry the plot forward without overusing the narrator to tell the readers what they need to know? If so, you may be ready to write a good short short story.

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