FlashFiction.Net

In yesterday's entry, the desire of flash fiction was likened to the desire in the "quickie," with a link to a FOXSexpert article on the quickie. That led to this comment by flash fiction writer Meg Pokrass:

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I have some things to say here indeed! I just can't remember what they are. I read this so quickly because the silliness aspect of this grabbed me and sucked me under! God!

I think, no damnit...no, I KNOW what this is about! Why deny it! Flash fiction is sex! We live for sex and we die after we live! We all do!! Flash is the heart muscle under the shirt, so bring it out and let it bleed!

For lovers/flash writers on the go... here is my advice. Bring something wetish - multi-purpose oils are terrific for this. Olive, canola... imagine this: you can say to anyone who notices your oily stash, "I prefer my onions with ____ oil and carry it with me."

Likewise, a flash writer always carries a well lubricated pen (because gosh, we know how damn drying paper is!) and multi-purpose words and a little journal! Words like sneaker, wave, behind, and slide. These words are flexible - spontaneous, sly, and delicious if you allow them to be!

My mind is filthy enough for flash fiction indeed! Also, if possible choose a nom deplume! because my name (for example) really does sound like a quickie!!

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There's a lot to love here in Meg's comment, but I'm especially drawn to this comment: "Words like sneaker, wave, behind, and slide. These words are flexible—spontaneous, sly, and delicious if you allow them to be!" The flash fiction writer uses words for the seduction, more so perhaps than plotting, and they might be akin to Seinfeld's special bedroom move, the clockwise swirl. 

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Some flash writers use word prompts, such as a list of five words picked (at random?) by one of the members, and the challenge in such a group becomes to use the words unexpectedly, to have them appear spontaneous (which of course they aren't because they've been chosen ahead of time). Reading over each writer's use of the five words is indeed a pleasure, with the flexibility, slyness and deliciousness of each writer's style and process on display.  It's about finding the surprising word or the familiar word used in an interesting way.

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One piece I wrote began with these five words: Cough, Faucet, Stuffed, Sneakers, Cross. I'd just come back from Napa Valley and still felt full of the images of vineyards. Here are the sentences that used the prompt words:

• A faucet coughed up merlot.


• Someone made the sign of the cross as if the blood leaked from the building’s pores.


• She stuffed our glass with Zinfandel.


• She said you know that guy who’d drowned in the vat, well, she had his sneakers.

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These words (as I reread the piece) helped to give the flash fiction piece its sense of surprise, its clockwise swirl, its deliciousness. This placement of words in unexpected places, the creation of unfamiliar phrasings, that feeling of otherworldliness (akin to sex?) all gives flash its power, its ability to move, very quickly, readers from the ho-hum of the everyday to the charged urgent "quickness" of flash fiction world.

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So, thanks Meg for that excellent comment. And thanks for all those writers of flash fiction, artfully recreating the "quickie" in their (short) short fiction.

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