Photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash
“And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual” ~Laura Gilpin
Hi friends, I’m rerunning this early newsletter for those of you who are new subscribers and/or new to writing flash. Flash Immersion-ists, there’s a fun prompt further down for you to try and share with the group for Day Five of our Extravaganza. If you think you’d like to take part in the Flash Immersion month here, please consider upgrading. We’re off to a wildly creative start, with dozens of new stories drafted already!
Thanks to all of you who shared your writerly origin stories! So interesting and moving. I feel so heartened to hear of the many paths that brought us to where we are now. I’m so glad that we’re all here and writing. Making stories and poems and essays. Making good art together.
I’m often asked to define flash fiction in interviews and almost out of a sense of duty, I provide the standard answer (flash fiction is a story of 1,000 words or fewer), but it feels so dissatisfying to say this. Yes, that’s flash at its most basic but to those of us who read, write, and teach it, it’s so much more than that! To say flash is a short story, only smaller, feels much too, well, reductive.
Flash fiction, I believe, is its own unique literary form, not merely a short story in miniature, and we should teach it as such.
I love what W. Todd Kaneko says in his essay, “Planets in Miniature: On Kandor and Compression in Flash Fiction,” from the wonderful flash anthology edited by Megan Giddings, Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction (Aforementioned Productions, 2019):
“A flash fiction could be called a little story, but not in the way that a dollhouse is a miniature of those mansions on the affluent side of town. While a flash fiction takes up less real estate on the page than a longer work, it can deliver an equal amount of story, just compressed. In great part, compression in flash fiction is not about shrinking, but about hyper-efficient narrative.”
How then to teach new writers to achieve an “efficiency of narrative?” We can of course have them write a longer, traditional short story, then instruct how to cut it down to size:
Trim the fat by eliminating redundancies, asides, excess description, needless backstory and exposition.
Sharpen dialogue by distilling it to its essence, to only what serves characterization and plot.
Edits like the above, as well as “arriving late and leaving early” are just fundamental ways to make any writing stronger. And we’re still teaching and defining flash as a shorter, short story.
But flash writers can and should aspire to concision/compression/distillation up front. And we as teachers of the form, should encourage an openness to all the many ways to achieve it. We can, for example, avail ourselves of the tools of poets to create emotional power via language and imagery, rhythm and sound. Flash fiction is a form uniquely suited to experimentation and innovation and hybridity and there are numerous published examples we can use in the classroom or workshop. Hermit crab flash, where borrowed forms are used to tell a story, is also becoming very popular.