Flash Fiction Chronicles

Like many writers, I’ve read a wide spectrum of fiction.  I’ve read the classics and the out and out trash.  I’ve read genre and meta-fiction.  I’ve read prose poems and flash fiction.  Three writers spoke to my soul: Hemingway, John O’Hara and Raymond Carver.  For me, Hemingway made the fictional world a real place through his use of concrete sense details and through his use of sequences of action.  John O’Hara made me appreciate just how much weight good dialogue can carry and still sound natural.  From Raymond Carver I stole form.  There is a straight line that runs from Hemingway through O’Hara through Carver to Compressionism.  Compressionism is the use of words to paint a picture that tells a story.  If you want to go back further than Hemingway there’s Chekhov.

But now we must strip the language once again as periodically it must be stripped and return it to its concrete, distilled, image driven purity.  Image, thought and language help to make us human.  In the cluttered ultra-postmodern, apocalyptic world community we live in, we must constantly remind ourselves of our communal humanity.  We all dream.  We all dream in images.  We compressionist must commit to image in all its horrible clarity.  Clarity must be our artistic truth.

Some may ask, why must the image be horrible?  It is not the image but the clarity that is horrible.  It is this rendering of an image that has not been censored by the intellect, by the conscious mind that is horrible.  The conscious mind is merely an island on the ocean of the subconscious mind.  This is not to say the intellect has no place in the creation of art.  There would be no art without the vision and discipline of the intellect.  But it is the image driven nether inner world of the universal subconscious mind that the compressionist must seek to render.

So let it begin here in Pittsburgh, this struggle for a language so stripped, so concrete and so distilled and image driven that beauty is not the subject matter because the unflinching clarity of the rendering is the subject matter.  This is the goal of Compressionism.

What should be the length of the compressionist short story?  For the purist, somewhere around 1,000 words.  Of course, this is only a suggestion.  But an image driven flash fiction story will always be able to say more, to imply more, than a non-compressionist story of similar length.  We are not talking poetry.  We are talking about a prose that reaches beyond poetry, a prose that with luck reaches a third and forth and even a fifth dimension.

What should be the ultimate goal of Compressionism?  To produce flash fiction that revitalizes the language.  To have flash fiction writers read by the many and studied in our halls of higher learning.  To ultimately have the very short story take its rightful place along side the poem, short story and novel as one of the great artistic forms of literature.

Bio: Guy Hogan is a Vietnam War veteran and the editor/publisher of the Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette.  He received his MFA in fiction writing from the University of Pittsburgh in 2006.  Compressionism: The Pittsburgh Stories is his ebook of flash fiction.

Every writer needs material.  Every writer has material.  Remember, there are no boring stories only boring writers.  Maybe I was luckier than many who wanted to write short stories.  Let’s see.  I grew up African-American in a black ghetto in Pittsburgh when steel was still king in the city and television televised professional boxing every Friday night.  There was a chain of ice cream parlors in the city and a vendor came around our neighborhood at night selling hot tamales.  The three rivers and the many bridges across the rivers were here but not Point State Park which would come later. 

There was the army and Vietnam and then a local community college with a campus of bra-less young women in very short skirts and dresses.  You could score dope across the table in the snack bar.  On the jukebox in the snack bar was the music of The Doors and many of the professors had hair as wild or as long as your own hair.  Around the nation other young people occupied buildings and marched in the streets.  Everyone with a cause seemed to be marching in the streets and there were a lot of good causes.  There were so many good causes that cities were set on fire and the national guard was often called out.

I’ve had a lot to write about.  I have good material.  But a writer needs a vision, a voice and a method to mold the material, to give it form.  The form may come from a “school of literature.”  This school may provide parameters which keep the writer from always starting at ground zero every time he or she begins a story.

I teach Seminar in Composition (this was in 2004) to freshmen at the University of Pittsburgh.  I’ve been writing short stories for longer than any of my students have been alive.  I try to convey to them the fundamental impact writing will have on their thinking.  I stand in front of them and say things like, “You really don’t know what you think until you write it down.”  Or I’ll say, “A cliche is evidence of lazy thinking.”  And then there’s, “In your essays due next week be sure there is some thinking on the page.”  I constantly remind my students of the intimate connection between thoughts and words.

Recently, the class has been reading Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, her masterful work on the impact photography has had on the modern human mind’s ability to comprehend reality.  One of her arguments explores how for many people the photograph, the image, takes the place of the reality it represents.

When I’m not teaching I attend classes, too.  I’m working on my MFA in fiction writing.  I attend a writing workshop and a film class.  The film class is on American silent films of the 1920s.  I am convinced of the intimate relationship among thoughts, words and images.  Do you sense a pattern, too?

Of course, Seminar in Composition is not a fiction workshop.  It’s a composition workshop.  I try to demonstrate for my students what I feel are the parameters of good old fashion concise writing.  Concise writing is always highly esteemed.  No matter what fields my students go into, what they learn in my class will help them to express their thoughts on paper in clean, lean prose.  They will have a heightened awareness about placing the right word, the right sentence, the right paragraph and the right punctuation in the right place.  They will know the value of no unnecessary words.  In fiction, Compressionism does all these things and much more.

The nature of the writing my students are doing is of necessity exposition.  They must explain things.  Compressionism reduces exposition to a secondary role.  Compressionism is a word I made up.  It means: using words to paint a picture that tells a story.  It is the kind of writing I try to do.  In Compressionism there is very little explaining.

Many readers may argue that exposition has always held the primary position in fiction, that it is the driving force of fiction.  We compressionists are calling for a new fiction, a fiction that purifies the language, that reduces the language as near as possible to its true metaphorical roots, a language that is relentlessly concrete and unadorned.  It is my argument that only an image-driven language can do these things.  Why image driven?

Let’s go back to the silent films of the 1920s.  The silent film was a purely image-driven narrative.  Even the inter-titles had to be read.  The inter-titles were the exposition.  A piano player or an orchestra might accompany the film but the film was purely image driven.

Let me ask this.  How do we dream?  What are our dreams made up of?  Our dreams are not made up of a stream of words.  They are not torrents of exposition.  They are images.  Of course, all our senses can be involved in dreaming but the main sense is seeing.  And it is not seeing with our eyes.  It is seeing with our minds.

Guy Hogan is a Vietnam War veteran and the editor/publisher of the Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette. He received his MFA in fiction writing from the University of Pittsburgh in 2006.   Compressionism: The Pittsburgh Stories is his ebook of flash fiction.

Content, structure, and language work together. No one element can make a story work. Many writers use a series of steps—brainstorming, outlining, drafting, revision, editing, and proofreading—to juggle content, structure, and language. The order of each step is a matter of choice and fluctuates with story ideas. Here is my preference:

•  To create content: brainstorm, free-write, draft a first draft
•  To apply structure: outline first draft, then draft second draft
•  To perfect language: revise, edit, and proofread

Content refers to the subject matter of a story.

• The who, what, when, where, and how of a specific idea.
• A character (the protagonist) finds himself in a difficult situation at a certain time and place and must deal with that situation. 
• How the protagonist deals with the situation depends on the protagonist’s wants, character, and the nature of the obstacles he must overcome.
• Content provides the “story question or problem” that propels the protagonist through the plot and ultimately reveals a universal theme, a jolt, an epiphany, some small observance of life.
• Content evolves from a premise, notes, a rough draft, research, observation, plus the attitudes and concerns of the writer.

Structure refers to the basic organization of a story.

• Just as a play is divided into three acts, most stories have three main segments
  • The opening (Act 1) gives a story focus and meaning by providing the premise, setting, and tone of the story as well as hints at the nature of obstacles the protagonist will face.
  • The main body of the story (Act 2) focuses on the protagonist’s actions to resolve the story problem.
  • The conclusion (Act 3) reveals the results of the protagonist’s struggle and infuses that struggle with meaning.
• Each segment of a story has a similar structure: the overall story as well as each chapter, each scene within the chapter, each beat within the scene
• Structure also involves other devices such as set-ups and pay-offs, sub-plots, and the shaping of structure specifically to content.
• Structure evolves from outlines, note-taking, drafts or a combination of the three.
   

Language refers the diction and style used to express a story’s idea.

• Diction refers the specific words that are chosen
• Style refers to how those words are combined, the order, the length of sentences and includes the use of literary devices such as metaphor, symbolism, and allusion.
• Grammar keeps writing clear and understandable.
• Language evolves from revision and rhythm.

Process is what brings these three basic components of composition together.

Writing is a Process. Yeah, it is!

The rough draft is about content…
making it up.
The second draft is about structure…
making sense.
The third draft is about language…
making it clear.
The fourth draft is about perfection…
making it publishable.

Actually, the steps to the writing process bleed into each other like ink dropped from a leaky pen over one spot. The blotches don’t land in exactly the same place, but they seep beyond each other’s borders, and create a new kind of art.

This post appeared last year at Gay Degani’s Words in Place Blog.