Wednesday Therapy: Write the “Figuring Out” Flash

In an essay on short sto­ry struc­ture, Dou­glas Glover writes, “Lit­er­a­ture is a way of think­ing in which you think by push­ing your char­ac­ters through a set of actions (test­ing that char­ac­ter in a series of scenes which involve the same con­flict).” This sin­gle sen­tence (very much) changed the way I approached writ­ing flash. Where before I wrote a flash piece to write a flash piece (if that makes any sense), I began instead to write to fig­ure things out, for myself, my character(s), and any read­ers I’d be lucky enough to have.

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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).

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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.”

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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).

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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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