Flash Fiction Chronicles

I pulled out my old copy of  What If? (1990) by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter last week after reading  Ms. Painter’s essay “You and the Piano Bench” in Rose Metal’s Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, edited by Tara L. Masih. 

Running through the table of contents of What If? was like being plopped down at a Ritz-Carlton Sunday Brunch of Butt-Kicking Advice.   The “table” is piled with tasty dishes: “Beginnings” and “Notebooks” offer ways to get started. The main entrees of “Characterization,” “Point of View,” and “Plot” come next, followed by just desserts, “Resolution and Meaning.”   Garnishes such as “Dialogue” and “Games” crowd in between. 

The chapter I dove into is called “From Situation to Plot,” and that’s where I found the delicious quotation from Heraclitus:  “Character is destiny.”  Wow, I thought, I gotta share this.  Great advice for short fiction writers!

In their writing handbook, authors Bernays and Painter reference another book  Technique in Fiction  by Robie Macauley and George Lanning, stating that this “observation ‘character is destiny’ should be ‘written on the wall of every novelist’s study.’ ”

Why? Because it contains the two basic ingredients for any story, long or short.  

CHARACTER and PLOT: A particular character with specific strengths, flaws, and desires is put into a particular situation where he or she must take action and eventually resolve that situation either happily or tragically. 

Who that character is  (strengths and weaknesses) determines the action taken in the given situation, and  therefore also determines the results of that action.  This revelation of character under duress is why we read, listen to, and watch stories.

“Character is destiny.”  This aphorism from a Greek philosopher from Ephesus offers the some of the best advice I’ve seen for the writing of flash fiction.  It’s short!  No words are wasted.  Each word is essential. A character creates his own life by the actions he or she takes in any given situation.  Perfect. 

So for the writer of flash, I offer two bits advice.

1) Character: create a specific character who has  flaws; however, in the brief space of 500 or 1000 words, focus on one flaw, one weakness, something that creates doubt in the reader: how will this character come through this specific situation because, oh my gosh, he might not!  This helps instill empathy and emotion in the reader.

2) Situation: create a specific situation that challenges the very flaw a character has and don’t make it easy.  The choices available to the character depend on genre, but most choices work best when they aren’t between obvious good and obvious evil, but two evils.  Maybe between two goods also, but the point is that the choices be difficult, that the choices must call up in the character all his strength to choose right if the story is to end well…or choose wrong if the story is to end in tragedy.

In this way, the character creates his own destiny by his choices.  It is evitable and therefore, rings true.

So. 

“Character is destiny.”  

Write it out. 

Tape it to your computer.

Now get to work.

Rose Metal Press has published a new book called Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field, edited by Tara L. Masih.  This short (of course!) 157 page-handbook gives beginning writers of flash fiction a place to start and continuing flashers a much-needed resource. 

In their introduction, publishers Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney discuss flash (0-1500 word range) as fiction that blends “genres and forms.”    However, in presenting the conventions of flash fiction, they wanted a book that would not “pin said inventive forms down with strict definitions.”   What they offer instead is “a book of ideas about and for flash fiction.” 

Editor Tara L. Masih has pulled together many of those ideas in twenty-five essays by writers such writers as Ron Carlson, Rusty Barnes, Kim Chinquee, Steve Almond, Vanessa Gebbie, Robert Olen Butler, Stuart Dybek, and Randall Brown.  The essays are divided into useful categories including “Freedom and Feeling in the Form,” “Beginnings and Endings,” and “Focusing and Editing,” making the book a user-friendly field guide to Flash Fiction, to be read either as it has been put together or searched through for specific help or inspiration.

“In Pursuit of the Short Short Story,”  the editor’s introduction, Ms. Masih opens with the following quotation, “Each drop encases its own separate note, the way each drop engulfs its own blue pearl of light,” from Stuart Dybek’s story “Nighthawks.”  Although this description in its original context is meant to define rain, Ms. Masih believes it is “as close to a definition of flash fiction” as she can give us.  The editor of the “Field Guide” then unfolds a history of the short short story beginning with Washington Irving and Poe to its present incarnation on the internet and in print journals dedicated to short short fiction. 

As for the essays, they offer insights into the art and craft of flash as well process.  Vanessa Gebbie writes about kidnapping the reader and using prompts in her piece called “Fireworks and Burnt Toast.”   Shouhua Qi discusses the origin of flash in China where short shorts are called Minute Stories, Pocket-Size Stories, and more familiar to the online flash reader, Smoke-Long stories.  In Robert Olen Butler’s “A Short Short Theory,” the author expands James Joyce’s one ephiphany at the end of a story to include a similar epiphany early on in the piece, “when the yearning of the character shines forth.”  Many of the essays feature flash fiction pieces written by their authors.

A useful, intelligent addition to the discussion of flash fiction, Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction manages to give readers what they want to know about flash fiction without limiting the genre with “strict definitions.”

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction:
Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field.
Edited by Tara L. Masih
ISBN: 978-0-9789848-6-1
$15.95

 Order directly from Rose Metal Press