FlashFiction.Net

I’m in the midst of reading a book about various rhetorical devices, and that led me to Google, a search that led me to Robert A. Harris and his online Handbook of Rhetorical Devices.

Perhaps, I’m odd, but one way of writing flash I so so love is building a flash around a particular rhetorical device, and making that device the title of the flash. I did this previously here with Zeugma.

For example, consider #37 on the Harris list, hyperbaton, defined by Harris as “departure from normal word order.” Example include the following:

delayed epithet; the adjective follows the noun, as in “His was a countenance sad.”




divided epithets, two adjectives are separated by the noun they modify, as in Milton’s “with wandering steps and slow.”




the separation of words normally belonging together, done for effect or convenience: “In this room there sit twenty (though I will not name them) distinguished people.”




emphasis of a verb by putting it at the end of the sentence: “We will not, from this house, under any circumstances, be evicted.”

Of course, the danger of such inversion is Yoda-talk: Pretty, these rocks look. It seems more “gut” than “logic” of why some inversions work and others don’t. Frost loved inversion, as in that beginning of “Mending Wall”: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” And if Frost liked it, well, something to it there must be.

So, my advice were you to take, you’d title a flash piece HYPERBATON and throughout you’d use inversions. I think the flash would be better if the idea of “inversion” becomes a central issue. And maybe there’s a possibility to work in some kind of pun or word play with the idea of “hyper” and “baton.”

For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net’s suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.

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