Tuesday
This past weekend, I had the wonderful opportunity to do a presentation on flash fiction at the 62nd Annual Philadelphia Writers' Conference in the Independence Mall section of Center City. What fascinated me the most, besides seeing Betsy Ross and Benjamin Franklin in the hotel lobby, were the questions from the audience.
The question "What is flash?" seemed to be foremost on people's mind, along with the difference between flash fiction and prose poetry. Participants had questions about the word-count boundaries of flash fiction and the markets for flash fiction, especially the reception flash receives in the established literary journals. There was one question, if I can remember correctly, about dialogue in one-paragraph flash fiction and how to format it.
Maybe because I wrote flash fiction before I knew it existed, these questions weren't the foremost in my mind as I began my flash journey. I had two primary questions: (1) "How can I compress narrative to tell a story in such a short space?" and (2) "If I choose not to tell a story, how can I make these tiny fictions matter?" Those questions still tend to drive my flash fictions into existence.
Traditional narrative might be a machine of desire, driven into existence by that desire being brought full-blown into the world by some inciting incident, but it's also a meaning-making machine. In other words, the structure of narrative guarantees that the ending will mean something, both to the character and the reader. It means something because (1) it was hard-earned by a character's overcoming the obstacles to attain it; (2) it had some profound and/or transforming impact upon the character and some kind of emotional impact or new learning for the reader; (3) it represents the resolution to some ongoing conflict; (4) it had some kind of stakes attached to it: and so on.
Flash narrative challenges me to find the same kind of meaning at the ending without the benefit of the space for setting-the-scene, for a build-up of complications, for the drawn-out middle of challenges faced and obstacles overcome. And that's part of the joy of writing flash, finding ways to get the same power of an ending in 300 words that a 30,000 word novel might deliver.
And the other challenge is to figure out how else a piece might "flash" besides using the meaning-making desire-mechanisms of narrative. How else do the things of the world mean something to us? Must it always be through story and narrative? Can things matter not only because of what they represent (through metaphor) but for what they actually are? Of course, in the post-modern world, there is no capturing of the Real, only the creation of It. In other words, a flash cannot capture "what is" because the flash itself is creating "what is." But if one imagines a Real that can be captured (for example, the Real of a hummingbird or the Real of heartbreak), then I wonder how flash might be used to make those things Real, to capture what cannot be captured, a net for all the tiny things that slip through the wide holes of narrative and short story and novellas and novels and trilogies and fourologies.
I think flash will always have such challenges attached to it, the challenge of compressed narrative and the challenge of narrative-alternatives. Focusing on these challenges rather than on what labels and word-count constraints get arbitrarily attached to flash might be something to consider so that your flash doesn't merely fit the definitions but, instead, reconstitutes them.
For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net's suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.
