FlashFiction.Net

Last night, I gave my flash “colleagues” in my Rosemont College MFA in Creative Writing Flash Fiction Workshop the following flash prompt for all of us to work on for next week: Getting an emotionally resonant ending is quite a tall order given the tiny space of flash fiction (say 500-750 words). Here are some (possible) ways to get there:

• Archetypes. If I wrote a story about a whiteboard marker, it might take awhile to build readers’ attachment to “marker,” and of course in flash “time” isn’t something one usually has. I often draw upon ready-made attachments—ones that already act as emotional triggers for readers—by using archetypal characters, situations, and relationships in my flash. To get immediately to the archetype means (sometimes) using the archetypal names—mother, father, wife, lover, child, etc.—instead of characters’ names.



• Desire. Of course, one can care about a marker if the marker desires something that readers’ can identify with. Have that marker desire something with all his or her marker heart and then have that marker commit every bit of his or her self into getting that thing. A student recently wrote a story about a daughter’s desire to know the nature of her father’s love for her. In her room, as they talked, she pushed on a bruise caused by his endless pushing her into athletic competitions. She wanted, with all of her being for her father to reach out and stop that hand that pushed against the bruise. Do you feel the emotion rising in you at all? I know I did, and still do, every time I think of what she might do to realize her father’s love.



• Titles. Well, no one is going to have a heart wrenching reaction to a title (probably), but titles can get some stuff out of the way so the story can begin without the history and exposition that might get in the way of the storytelling. Using titles to fill in the gaps of a flash—to answer questions readers might have about what happened before or after—can give the writer the freedom to focus on the emotional power of the here and now. It could hint at the character’s desire. Imagine the title for the story of the daughter pushing against her bruise. “Because He Doesn’t” has a certain power to it. “After Her Seventeenth Injury” hints at all that has come before. And so on.



• The unfamiliar. Finding the emotion in the unfamiliar or unexpected place seems to go against that idea of relying on archetypes to carry. The idea is to use the archetypal moment (the inevitable loss of innocence) that we have all experience but to have it realized through an action and/or situation that we haven’t experienced before. In one of the first flashes I wrote and liked, a husband explores the feelings of becoming a father by bringing crickets to his bug-eating pregnant wife.



• Endings. Yes, a lot of that emotional resonance rests on the ending. It’s about finding the image and/or word that will act as the emotional trigger, but that word and/or image seems to work best if it isn’t the expected, cliched word or image. Of course a story that ends with sunrises, love, and tears might in the hands of an amazing writing work to move our emotions. The ending rests on the writers’ ability to prepare us for that powerful image/word by using it throughout, attaching us to it in new and interesting ways, drawing upon our conscious and unconscious associations to it.



• Middles. I end with middles because it is the middle that is the trickiest thing, I’ve come to think, in creating flash. The traditional middle involves the character acting to realize a desire, but being thwarted time and time again. I think the key to middles is to have you, as writer, attached to the desire of the character so that the character is facing something that you yourself need to confront and rather not. The job of the middle is to take the character (and you!) deeper into this issue. If death is the thing being confronted, the middle acts as the gods and goddesses acting to throw things at the character to make the character grasp what needs to be grasped about, in this example, death. “You thought you understood death? Take this,” they seem to be saying. “Oh, now you think you get it? How about this?” And so on.

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I’m sure I’ve said this before, both here and elsewhere, but the problem I see with too many flash pieces is that they feel to me as if the driving force behind them is that the writer wanted to write a flash. What I’m asking for here is about wanting to discover something (in the world, a character, my self, someone I know, wanted to know, those kind of things) and writing toward that thing but being unsure of how to get there or what I’ll discover. All that writing that I’ve done before allows me (perhaps) to think less about craft/the writing itself (what I know) and more about something revelatory (what I don’t know). The ending insight is not only my character’s, but mine also. And hopefully also yours.