Monday
I love rules, love books on craft. I collect writing prescriptions, all those dos and don'ts, the haves and have nots. A story must have a conflict. A story cannot have long exposition at the outset. It easier to dismiss the rules, as many of the students I've worked with seem to do (or at least want to do), but I prefer the challenge of imagining that the rule makers are right, all those practitioners telling me what I should and shouldn't do to make my writing work.Of course, I might be crazy to do such a thing.
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But imagine if you, drawn to flash by the imagined freedom of a form in transition, a form with its rules yet to be defined, have it all wrong. Imagine if flash demands things from you that you've never dreamt of. Image if word-count is the least of all the boundaries that confines flash fiction. If that is so, it shouldn't be so surprising to find, in what Roberta Allen refers to as a "tiny container for change," a sense of the walls closing in, of not being able to move too far without bumping against a boundary. In fact, were I to play devil's advocate, I might ask, "Why did you go to the tiniest spaces of all to find freedom? Why did you flee here, of all places, to find the freedom in writing you so desired?"
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I think I have the beginning of an answer to those questions, but I'm curious what other flash readers and writers think. What are the rules that flash writers play by? Or maybe, more accurately, what place do rules have for you as flash writer, if any? I'm interested to see what we come up with.
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From Joseph Young
December 7, 2009 at 11:33 am
Not sure, but perhaps to get away from the tyranny of time, of plot? I don’t want to make characters go here and then there, to change. Epiphany, is that real? Anyway, shrinking time to close to zero, but still having story, maybe that’s it. I like being squeezed in by time. It’s comforting, right, to be squeezed?