Wednesday Therapy: Write the "Figuring Out" Flash
As a reader of a lot of unpublished (and published) flash, I haven’t often encountered the “figuring out” flash piece, and that might make sense for a number of reasons: (1) not all flash writers are concerned with narrative flash that figures things out; (2) flash has become a form that resists rules and any attempts to constrain its possibilities with definition; (3) two hundred, three hundred, five hundred, even seven hundred fifty aren’t a whole lot of words in order to figure something out, especially through “a set of actions.” I do think, however, that flash could use some more writers drawn to its form because flash is a “a way of thinking” rather than as a way of writing a story very quickly (and of course flash is surely that).
When I write the “figuring out flash,” I try to get the character to ask, “Why?” Everything in the story turns to that purpose, as happens often in myths, when the heavens and world conspire to force the (un)lucky hero/heroine into that series of actions leading to revelation. Such a flash forces the character to ask what’s behind things that have previously been taken for granted or have been avoided or have been too long accepted as “okay.”
Such flashes do work as therapy, for they become the way that I think about issues, ideas, the past, the world, and so on. There are of course many ways to think about these things: one could write an essay, enter a conversation, comment on a blog, paint a picture, sit in a bathtub surrounded by candles, smoke a clove cigarette, and so on. A cliched example might be the claustrophobic person stuck in an elevator. These confrontations often begin the flash for me, without explanation or back story or exposition, and they force characters to act in novel ways (well, novel for them, for sure, but novel for the reader, too, if one hopes to maintain a reader’s interest).
A less cliched flash I’m currently working on involves a father whose son has developed a persistent tic. It, for some reason, drives him crazy, this tic(k)ing son. The story is about figuring out, for the writer/father/reader, what’s behind that crazed obsession to make it stop, and those actions lead (I hope) everyone deeper into the complexities of fathers, sons, and that clock that ticks like a bomb between them, ready to explode them apart in a flash, unless someone figures out a way to defuse it.
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posted on 22 Sep 2010, 12:49 PM
because flash is a “a way of thinking”........
YES. I just finished a collection of flash and my thought after reading was that there was an emotion that ran throughout all the stories consistently, apart from the individual plot lines. That act of "thinking" on the part of the writer was pressed onto me as a reader.
posted on 22 Sep 2010, 2:06 PM
What collection was that, Sheldon? And thanks for the comment!
posted on 23 Sep 2010, 2:07 PM
This is fascinating, Randall, and has gotten me to thinking how it might apply to flash. One issue, I think, is not so much that word count doesn't give us time to have the character try different solutions--there are plenty of flash that read like short stories, only shorter--but that it doesn't give us room to "cover our tracks," to hide behind the wizard's curtain, so to speak, and so it ends up feeling too obvious. Maybe that's why the traditional short story, shortened for flash, often don't feel like it works. Do you think there are ways specific to flash to accomplish this? I'm remembering the story you mentioned above, and that I liked it a lot.
posted on 27 Sep 2010, 12:18 AM
Great question, Nancy. I'll be answering it in an upcoming entry. Thanks!
posted on 10 Oct 2010, 1:38 PM
I think it's a great challenge to think about a character figuring something out in in a flash piece. Yesterday, at the Southern Writers' Fest in Nashville, Richard Bausch ended Q&A with some profound words of encouragement about writing, and one of them is that writing is a form of mental health and that we are figuring things out through our writing constantly. It's also about sharing, he said, and in pieces in which the characters ask "why," as this article suggests, we are figuring things out right along with those characters and with our readers--right on!
posted on 17 Oct 2010, 11:48 AM
Thanks, Chad. I like that sense of "sharing" from Bausch. Very cool.