Breaking Free of the Ordinary - Flash Immersion - Day Fifteen

writing fresh, concise description

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Okay, welcome to Day Fifteen! Today, I’d like to talk a little about description in flash fiction.

I’ll keep asking you to include sensory detail and specificity (vs. generality) in your writing. Someone once challenged me for putting so much emphasis on this, saying that since flash requires concision shouldn’t most if not all description be left out?
My answer to this is yes, please leave out all unnecessary description. Boring description. Expected, clichéd description. And often, physical description of your characters or their clothes is unnecessary as well, unless it’s somehow pertinent.

But you need to bring your reader wholly and deeply into your story and you can’t do that with action and dialogue alone. The problem is we as writers tend to have our “go to” descriptions we’ve gleaned from years of reading and watching tv and movies.

If I say “hospital room” to you, what immediately springs to mind? The beeping of the monitors, the antiseptic smells, etc. Those things, I promise you, immediately come to your reader’s mind as well. And journal editors have seen these a million times in the submission queues. This is the sort of description that is skimmed over much like when you’re driving through the Badlands of South Dakota. Suddenly you see that giant prairie dog on the side of the road and you break free of your trance, sit up, laugh, whatever.

I urge you to make every single part of your flash fiction so fresh and new and interesting that your reader (or slush pile reader) sits up and takes notice from beginning to end. With fewer words at your disposal, the description you do include needs to be strong, palpable, interesting, and carry a lot of emotional or metaphorical weight.

With this in mind, you should also consider how you describe ordinary things. Can you look at those things with fresh eyes? In Susan Minot’s connected collection of stories, “Monkeys,” she shows a character plunking down a crumpled up napkin after dinner and saying that it “bloomed” on the table. Can you see that? I can and it’s perfect.

Some tips for writing description in flash fiction:

• Choose the strongest, most evocative details to describe.

• Don’t describe your characters’ looks unless they’re in some way pertinent, interesting, etc. There’s a place for physical description in flash, but be discerning.

• Description that moves adds energy to the writing. So not just what a tree looks like, but how its branches sway, its leaves flutter to the ground, for example.

• A quick revision tool is to strike out as many adjectives as possible. Do we need to know the car is 1. small 2. green 3. rusted? Of those three, which is the most interesting descriptor?

• If you describe with a simile, try not to overwork the simile (thus taking up a lot of space in the story).

• Make your descriptions do double duty in some way. Does your description heighten the emotional tone of the story?

I happen to believe one reason we get “stuck” in writing a scene or a story is that we are boring ourselves. We begin a scene set in a hospital, a bar, a dinner table and the writing quickly goes stale. It’s because we’re not really tapping into our subconscious, but rather we're subconsciously delivering what we’ve read and seen before. The writing is automatic. We know we want to create something lively, moving, interesting, but it’s difficult to overcome the tried and true.

We writers need ways to overcome our natural tendency to write scenes in the way they have always been written. The exercise for today will help you to see a common scene with fresh eyes and in a sense, set your writing free.

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YOUR PROMPT

I want you to imagine a scene in a commonplace setting. One you’ve seen in fiction many times. A hospital room, a bar, a dining room, a park, a school yard, whatever. No doubt your brain already conjures up certain images and descriptions just by reading those words.

Now, I want you to insert some fresh detail. Don’t give this too much thought and don’t worry about making sense, just insert the unexpected detail. Challenge yourself to use as few adjectives as possible.

Examples: a clown at the train station, a daisy growing out of the sidewalk, an old man walking backwards, an animal in a hospital room, a book that smells like lilacs, etc. 

Perhaps the odd detail will drive the scene forward or perhaps it will remain in the background, but what this exercise does is trick your brain into writing a scene in that setting that has, I promise you, never been written before. You have given yourself permission to write outside the box. You have “primed the pump” of your subconscious and now all bets are off.

How does your unexpected detail serve to create a tone for the story?

Does it accomplish foreshadowing?

Is there metaphorical significance to the detail?

Does your character noticing the detail tell us something about them or their current emotional state?

Consider also describing something ordinary in an extraordinary way (Susan Minot’s napkin that “bloomed” on the table.)

Do not worry about writing a complete story, but if you end up with one, wonderful!