Thursday
Thursday Flash Craft: Five Can't Miss Ways to Avoid a Reader's "So what?"
My recent perusal of flash fiction submission guidelines and editor interviews led me to the following insight: "You don't want a reader, at the end of the flash, to say 'So what?'" That reaction has to do, methinks, with readers not grasping what makes a piece flash-worthy: Of all the incidents/happenings in the world, why this one? What makes it worthy of such attention? Why, of all the times we could've entered the characters' worlds, do we enter now? And so on. The "So What?" says to me that a flash hasn't satisfied readers' need for a flash to add up to something more than a count of its words.
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So here are some never-miss, sure-fire, personally guaranteed, un-disclaimered ways to avoid that dreaded "So What?" reaction to your flash.
- Use traditional narrative structures. Readers might've been trained from reading story after story that meaning/mattering comes from something happening (inciting incident) to stimulate a character's DESIRE. The character then must ACT to fulfill that DESIRE, a DESIRE that is THWARTED (conflict) until some final resolution. That resolution is often realized and/or signaled by a reversal in the character (epiphany). Here, the contrast between the character at the beginning and the character at the end gives readers the answer to the "So what?" Why does the flash exist? Because the character profoundly, life-changingly transforms.
- Into this life, something different arrives. If the moment a writer chooses to write about in a flash is the same old day after day of a character, it easily leads to a reader's wondering "Why do I get this day and not the previous one, the next one?" Focusing on the one day that wasn't like the others is a way for writers to begin to answer that question. "You get this moment," such a story might be saying to readers, "because it was the day that wasn't like the others, the day something remarkable happened." Again, for some/many readers, that "remarkable thing" that enters a character's life needs to have a remarkable consequence, and more often than not, that means some kind of profound insight/transformation for the character at the end. However, if one decides against the epiphany as the meaning-maker, then there still, I think, needs to be some consequence at the end related to the character's encounter with the remarkable. In other words, make something different happen but don't think that will be enough. You will need the remarkable to be in the ending, too.
- Use the title of a flash piece as a thesis statement. The "So What? is linked to that question listeners of a story might ask the teller, "Why are you telling me this?" In a classroom, teachers often begin the lesson with the outcomes/goals so students grasp the why? of what they're being told. Readers of flash might similarly need to know the purpose of it, especially if that purpose isn't going to be related to traditional ways of storytelling. Essay writers use a thesis statement to announce their purpose, so maybe flash writers can think of titles as such a thing. Let's say it's a story about a woman on a first date, and it ends with her and her date looking into an apartment, seeing a picture of an old withered married couple, and they take off in a sprint down the alley. There could be a "So what?" feeling to that story. Okay, so they see a picture and run away. Big deal. The right title could work to alleviate the so-what-it-ness of the moment. Maybe "Afterwards, She Loved Him" or "He Ran Also" or "It Wouldn't Happen to Them" or something way better than these examples.
- Reader learns something. In Citizen Kane, the meaning of Kane's death-bed whispered "Rosebud" is revealed only to the viewer. No character in the story gets that information. If there's an epiphany of some sorts for the readers, if the flash brings out in the reader a desire for something and then satisfies that desire, most readers would most likely not be thinking "So what?" The interesting thing to me about movies such as Citizen Kane and Psycho, those that announce modern cinema, is the way they seem to exist for the viewer more than for the characters. Write a flash that exists for your readers rather than for your characters to undergo a series of thwarted actions leading to resolution. Make the flash's purpose a revelation that belongs only to the reader.
- Be a poet and don't realize it. Look to non-narrative forms, such as poetry, and figure out why readers don't say "So what?" after reading them. Maybe readers don't because they don't have a clue about what a poem means, but there might be other ways poets avoid such reactions to their poems. Using language in new ways, continually surprising readers with unexpected phrasings and word choices are some ways poets "work it." Another way is the use of metaphor and objects. Truly, in a poem, "so much depends upon" the object (a red wheelbarrow, say) as a vehicle for carrying the meaning. I'm also thinking of Donne's conceits, when a geometric compass is compared to a husband travelling from his wife. The strong "unlike factor" between the objects and their gradually coming together as "one thing" creates the tension in the poem.
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So, have at it. Work your magic so instead of saying, "So what?" after reading your flash, we are saying, "By George, I think I've got it!" Or something like that.
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