FlashFiction.Net

I was convinced for a long while that poetry exists in a void. This is a particular affliction of poets. We feel, unlike you benighted prose craftsmen—bricklayers to our frescos, that we are pure, unique. We grapple with language in its elemental state, for goodness sakes, meter and rhyme, alliteration and assonance. Sometimes we recognize our readers, but more often pity them. Silly readers, I just hope you get a bit of what I’m putting out; if you don’t, it is probably your failing though.

Hubris is rather tasty, but makes for an unsatisfying meal. A thing I think is inescapable is that to be a writer, one needs a reader. And, unfortunately for my more postmodernist colleagues, readers seem to want narrative. This holds true even in poetry. It is so universal, that if you don’t provide it, or hints towards it, the reader will construct it in their head, sometimes from whole cloth.

As writers, we ignore the pull towards some sort of narrative to our peril, just as airplane designers can’t ignore gravity. It isn’t something we need to agree on, think about, or contemplate. It is just there. A useful maxim is “you will provide the narrative, or the reader will for you.”

Writing and reading flash fiction for me ignited possibilities of very sparse narrative, more sparse and stripped down than I would have thought. One of the things this work has helped me with is understanding that there is usually a story. If you don’t have a story, the reader will create one. It is the way we work. Flash had me thinking, what is the minimum criteria for “story”?

My poems were always pretty. My, I’m a clever fellow, with my interesting vowel sounds and alliteration! Working with compressed fiction has made me think a little more about a wider approach. The idea of writer and reader is centered around narrative. If a writer doesn’t make some sort of story, I think the reader still creates one. This is something that, if not actively used, should be recognized in writing.

I would say to poets and others, we are all, in the end, telling a story. The question is what story we want to tell.

About the Author

Todd B. Stevens is currently an MFA student at Rosemont College. He has studied English at Cornell and Villanova. Todd worked for many years as a bookseller. His poetry has recently been published in Mad Poets Review and Off the Coast and is featured in the anthology Prompted: Poems, Essays from Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio.

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