Sunday
Sunday Reflection: Upon Finishing a Flash Fiction Class
So I have to confess, I ended up taking a flash fiction class, because the poetry seminar I wanted to take unexpectedly closed. I write poetry, often formal poetry. While I knew intellectually as part of my MFA program I wanted to get to where I was more comfortable as a writer of prose, I certainly didn't expect to be in the deep end my first semester!
About the Author
Having now almost completed a class I didn't initially mean to take, on a subject I didn't know much about before, I find myself asking myself some questions. What did I learn here? What will I take away from this experience and add to my other writing? And will I keep writing "sudden fiction" in the future? There are a couple of things that come to mind.
I really didn't coming into this know much about writing narrative. As a critic and a researcher, I was familiar with the tools of narrative, but while I could identify and discuss them, I didn't have the right instincts to apply them. And I think, if nothing else, flash fiction teaches you to focus on a very pure, very strict, sense of narrative.
I am glad I took a flash course before taking a course that focuses on larger works. I thought that flash would be for a poet an easier form of narrative to master, because of its brevity and focus on language, than longer works. Longer prose intimidated me. How could I say so much? What if I ran out of ideas? I thought short pieces would allow me to use the kind of language and ideas I was already comfortable with from poetry. For me, though, this was the opposite. My instincts as a poet often conflicted with what I should be doing as a narrative writer, and the brevity of the flash form made this really apparent. In longer pieces, I believed this "lack" would be more concealed, could be covered up by word-play. In flash though there was little hiding from the need to have the narrative be tight, believable, and significant. I think I'm more ready now to look at some of the complexity of longer works, but very glad I've started out where I did. I could have learned some bad habits very quickly.
Writing flash is going to clearly inform my future poetry. In the past, I think I've made the mistake of thinking of narrative as something monolithic. A Tolstoy thing, huge and ponderous. In fact, by writing poems, I've often focused on occluding and evading narrative, suggesting its possibility, but not fulfilling it. Writing flash though has led me to discover different types of narrative drive, and the value of asking questions like "What does this character want here and what is he doing to get it?" One complaint I've always had about my poetry is it often has a sense of yearning, but seldom a sense of fulfillment. I think I can use the tools I've worked with as a flash writer to make my other writing stronger.
So will I be writing flash fiction in the future? Absolutely! I already am contemplating taking some old poems of mine that weren't working out to my satisfaction and trying to rewrite the idea behind them into flash pieces. Now I'm not saying it won't be a relief to get back to verse, but I think flash, narrative, prose structure, and the tools I've been working with this semester are going to be a valuable addition to my writing. I'm fairly sure that ten years from now, I'll look back and think it was an excellent thing for my development as a writer that my poetry seminar got cancelled!
Todd B. Stevens is currently an MFA student at Rosemont College. He has studied English at Cornell and Villanova. Todd worked for many years as a bookseller. His poetry has recently been published in Mad Poets Review and Off the Coast and is featured in the anthology Prompted:
Poems, Essays from Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which will be published early this year.
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posted on 13 Dec 2009, 12:43 PM
Todd you said it so well. I think all of us, fiction writers and poets, came to the class thinking this would be easy. For us fiction writers, I know I thought, shrink, reduce, condense -- how hard can that be? We all found out, shall I say, rather quickly. However, over the course of the semester, I learned so much about flash, but more importantly about my own writing. Although I write predominantly novel-length fiction, I also plan to keep writing flash to continue honing my skills -- for it only makes me a better writer.
posted on 13 Dec 2009, 5:00 PM
Flash fiction is a stone cold B(*& to write. And it looks so easy!
I'm very glad though this was my first foray into serious prose, I'm not even afraid of writing a short story anymore! The length just seems luxurious. I mean, give me a couple of thousand of words? Heck yes I can develop a narrative!
This was a heck of a class for all of us, and I admit I had a dark night of the soul a couple of weeks ago, where I was convinced I just wasn't going to get it. We had a good group of writers, and Randall did a fantastic job of pushing us.
This class is why I came to grad school.