RandallbrownDesire, it is often, perhaps too often, said drives narrative into being, and there is not only the desire of the main character to consider, but the desire of Reader, Writer, and some believe, even the Text itself. When you write very short things, you are often told what your text really wants:

“It’s begging to be a short story.”

“I’m certain this piece wants to be a prose poem.”

“What your text really is, what it’s telling you it is and you can’t hear it but I can, is that it wants to be a novel, maybe even a trilogy.”

So, yes, flash texts yearn, and I wonder, perhaps too much, what they desire and from whom they want it. What does the flash text crave from its characters, its readers, its writers? These text whisperers, the ones who hear things in my texts, would have me believe that the flash text wants to be something other than it is. I doubt it. I’m certain of the flash’s desire to be what it is, but what other yearnings burn inside that flash? Here are six guesses about what a flash text wants.

  1. To recreate the world in its image. At the end of “The Oven Bird,” Frost asks “What to make of a diminished thing?” That diminished has a number of meanings, like most things in Frost’s poems, but I’m drawn to “be-little” as a possible one. It’s the world that has become little, and Frost’s implied answer, or one such answer—”You give it a poem”—might lead some readers to think that the poem itself is a diminished thing, too. I don’t think so. Was it Frost who said, “The world isn’t fallen because Eve bit an apple, but because we believe she did?” Or was it someone writing about Frost? The point is that flash believes the world isn’t captured by words, but recreated by them. Each word carries that weight of re-creation (or is that recreation?), of procreation, of the compressed big bang. It’s the world stripped of the immaterial. It wants not the world as it is but the world as it might be, if flash were in charge.
  2. To matter. As most tiny things do, flash knows what you might think of it, its size associated with insignificance in your mind. Flash wants you to confess this thought, that you’re like the middle school social studies teacher who desires a full page for the “A.” Flash doesn’t fill pages the way those “A” students do. Flash must find other ways to matter, to add up to something, than the word after word, the failed action after failed action, the words chasing that hard-earned resolution, hard-earned because it took page after page to get there. Flash searches for the alternative way to matter in this world. Sometimes it finds profundity in what others find nothingness; other times, it finds meaning by eschewing their desire for somethingness. Flash doesn’t fit the tired, old rubrics; it needs another vision against which it gets it value.
  3. To be attended to. The process of reading a longer piece is the process of forgetting, so much so that I wonder if the novel, for example, works primarily subconsciously, as much an echo as a voice. A novel’s words want to disappear from consciousness, want to take root like the archetypal images of dreams. A flash’s words demand your attention, especially those (very) tiny flashes. A flash shouts out, “Attention must be paid!” It’s later flash wants to haunt you, like a flashback, a tiny moment in the midst of the ongoing narrative, a burst of something concentrated.
  4. To be inhaled. Sometimes, I think flash writers oversell the long hours spent working on a flash piece, as if they feel that anything so small must be defended as “work.” Having written and published longer pieces, I don’t feel that I constructed flash the way I did the longer pieces. Flash is okay coming out as an exhale, and I read somewhere that with each inhale, we take in the molecules from everyone who has ever lived. Maybe I made that up. I can’t remember. In any case, that exhale of flash adds your own nature to the nature of all that’s every been. Flash is okay being easy to get out of your system. Flash doesn’t want to be constructed and deconstructed, taken apart in bites. Swallow me whole, flash says. That’s the way flash came into the world, the way it’ll go out.
  5. To be measured by its girth. If we were to check Flash Fiction’s in-box, we’d find spam after spam for Fiction Extender pills. Too tiny? Take two of these. Girth, that “measurement around the middle of something,” might be a better measurement of flash. Its breadth! And within that breadth exists both breath and bread, something maybe important, for flash is certainly bigger than a breath and smaller than a breadbox, and the point is what? Breadth has associated with it concepts such as range, extent, scope, depth, reach. Flash won’t be taking any pills; it knows there’s more to it than meets the eye.
  6. To be loved. Because it’s what we all want, isn’t it?, in spite of our protestations about rejection meaning anything to us. Flash wants your big, big love, and of course it wants to deserve your love, be worthy of it, doesn’t want it given just because it wants it. Flash wants maybe then, the possibility of your big love, the potentiality of it, the hope of it. Maybe flash wants more this than flesh. Maybe flash would burn skin and leave only bone.

Randall Brown teaches at and directs Rosemont College’s MFA in Creative Writing and Graduate English programs. He is the author of the award-winning (very) short fiction collection Mad To Live and his essay appears in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction. He recently served as the Lead Editor of SmokeLong Quarterly. His work has been published widely, both on line and in print. He can be reached at http://randalldouglasbrown.blogspot.com/.