Sunday Reflection: Upon Finishing a Flash Fiction Class

Having now almost completed a class I didn't initially mean to take, on a subject I didn't know much about before, I find myself asking myself some questions. What did I learn here? What will I take away from this experience and add to my other writing? And will I keep writing "sudden fiction" in the future? There are a couple of things that come to mind.

I really didn't coming into this know much about writing narrative. As a critic and a researcher, I was familiar with the tools of narrative, but while I could identify and discuss them, I didn't have the right instincts to apply them. And I think, if nothing else, flash fiction teaches you to focus on a very pure, very strict, sense of narrative. 

I am glad I took a flash course before taking a course that focuses on larger works. I thought that flash would be for a poet an easier form of narrative to master, because of its brevity and focus on language, than longer works. Longer prose intimidated me. How could I say so much? What if I ran out of ideas? I thought short pieces would allow me to use the kind of language and ideas I was already comfortable with from poetry. For me, though, this was the opposite. My instincts as a poet often conflicted with what I should be doing as a narrative writer, and the brevity of the flash form made this really apparent. In longer pieces,  I believed this "lack" would be more concealed, could be covered up by word-play. In flash though there was little hiding from the need to have the narrative be tight, believable, and significant. I think I'm more ready now to look at some of the complexity of longer works, but very glad I've started out where I did. I could have learned some bad habits very quickly.

Writing flash is going to clearly inform my future poetry. In the past, I think I've made the mistake of thinking of narrative as something monolithic. A Tolstoy thing, huge and ponderous. In fact, by writing poems, I've often focused on occluding and evading narrative, suggesting its possibility, but not fulfilling it. Writing flash though has led me to discover different types of narrative drive, and the value of asking questions like "What does this character want here and what is he doing to get it?" One complaint I've always had about my poetry is it often has a sense of yearning, but seldom a sense of fulfillment. I think I can use the tools I've worked with as a flash writer to make my other writing stronger.

So will I be writing flash fiction in the future? Absolutely! I already am contemplating taking some old poems of mine that weren't working out to my satisfaction and trying to rewrite the idea behind them into flash pieces. Now I'm not saying it won't be a relief to get back to verse, but I think flash, narrative, prose structure, and the tools I've been working with this semester are going to be a valuable addition to my writing. I'm fairly sure that ten years from now, I'll look back and think it was an excellent thing for my development as a writer that my poetry seminar got cancelled!