FlashFiction.Net

Pia Z. Ehrhardt, writing in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field, talks of "joist-like sentences" in flash, "sentences where the energy settles, the focus tightens, and the truths that bear (bare) the story become clear" (129), a sentence that leads her to think "How did my story go from something I wanted to tell you to something I'm afraid for you to know, but that I must now talk about?" (130).

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Desire drives narratives into being, we are told, over and over. Mark Budman, also in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide, writes, "The protagonist must desire something and her desire has to reach its crescendo by the 500th word. The object of her desire doesn't have to be big, but it's important to her and it's important to the reader" (126).

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As a writing teacher, I've become more and more focused on the desire of flash writers, rather than on characters and readers and texts, a desire that leads them to write, recognize, and confront those joist-like sentences. In other words, I think of how the writer must desire something, something beyond wanting to write a story or flash, beyond wanting to be published, beyond wanting readers to be entertained and enlightened, beyond meeting the desire of texts for endings and meanings.

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So your Friday Prompt is to look over your flashes that have yet to realize themselves.Search them for those joist-like sentences, and write with the desire to write towards that sentence, rather than around it.

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