FlashFiction.Net

Rob Parnell's article "Writing An Act of Magic" begins, "You have thoughts. You write them down as words. Later, others read them and your thoughts become theirs. Spooky, eh? I’m sure it was once, when the Druids roamed prehistoric Europe, exchanging information in the form of archaic symbols."

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That transference, of the writer's psyche to the reader's, happens through the intermediary of language, and of course as we all know by now, there's an uncloseable gap between the Real and the Word. In other words, language is approximate, kind of as if an uncertainty principle existed within the letters: to know the Real is to be uncertain about the word used to capture it; to find the word is to lose the actual meaning it hopes to contain. 

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I've come to think of flash as the place where words go to mean something else. A prompt I'm rather fond of—the use of five random words to generate a flash—continually reminds me of the way words create worlds, how the point of writing flash (to me) is to bring words and their meanings both into question and into profundity. At the same they lead one to something meaningful they also bring a helping of "doubt."

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The trick ending, the twist that comes out of nowhere to change everything, doesn't seems to have lost its place in contemporary flash fiction. But there's always, to me, something gimmicky about flash, something that requires readers to be tricked into it. If indeed the twisted plot no longer satisfies readers, then from where else might the gimmick arise. The answer to that might be in the language itself, that twists upon itself, that is used unexpectedly, that juxtaposes words in here-to-before unseen ways. Adverbs and adjectives might even have a place in such a world. Imagine the desire to use the word "bravely." He strode bravely to the altar might not work, because perhaps strode already contains the hint of bravely, perhaps one isn't necessarily surprised by bravely appearing in this context, perhaps because it gives away too much, perhaps the bravely here brings things, in other words, too much into focus rather than into question. Where else might bravely appear and do its flash thang? That's the thrill, for me, of these "random word prompts," the joy of finding rightful places for words that seem to have no right it all in appearing where they do.

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This blog entry cries out for examples, of where bravely might appear throughout. But it's already here, isn't it?, doing its thang.

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