rumjhumI am an absolute newbie when it comes to writing Flash Fiction.

 

I used to be skeptical about Flash Fiction. I didn’t believe that it was a form that serious writers dealt with. It was more of a teeny bopper thing. The works of Anton Chekov, Borges and Franz Kafka were to be revered simply because they came from these great writers. Hemingway wrote the iconic – “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn” as a bar bet or a whimsical challenge. But then, he was Earnest Hemingway. Anybody else who wrote a piece smaller than a 1000 words was being pretentious.  As for Aesop’s Fables, they were baby stories I’d read as a baby. That’s all.

 

Then I found flash fiction creeping in to magazines that I read regularly on line and in print. I started to actually read the flash pieces, instead of skimming through them.  To my surprise I found that I not only enjoyed them, but many lingered on in my mind long after I had done reading them. There definitely was something here that I needed to know more about.

 

In a flash this form of story writing seemed similar to the précis writing exercises we used to do during English Language classes in school. I could do it, I told myself.  I plucked ideas as they floated past my mind and put them to work. Some short shorts emerged that seemed good enough to send out. I started to read flash fiction consciously, critically. I began to think about the stories that appealed to me and began questioning why they did and others didn’t. Unconsciously I began looking for that missing spell, that vital ingredient – newt’s tail and abracadabra – to make that exact magic potion needed to create a sparkling piece of flash fiction. I started to read more and more flash fiction.

 

The more I read, the more I realized that writing flash was definitely no cakewalk. It’s a lot harder to be concise and meaningful all at the same time. It’s tough when you fall in love with a phrase or sentence only to have to prune it, because good sense prevailed and you realized those words were after all redundant.

 

Writing flash fiction requires skill and that skill comes with discipline. And, the more you read the more attuned you get to the nuances. Besides, you can only write great flash fiction if you truly enjoy the genre. In other words, if you enjoy reading flash fiction, you’re more likely to write readable ones yourself!

 

These days I write more flash fiction than I used to. Some have found homes. But that is not the only good thing that I have gained. Writing flash fiction has, I have discovered, helped to make the prose in my longer pieces sharper. The tendency to meander is getting reigned in. I am not there yet, but I do have a sense of direction now. Taut writing acts like a tightly pulled bowstring; the arrows, or rather ideas in the case of stories, fly faster and truer.

 

Where exactly do I wish to go? How far do I want to travel? How much of that magic realm can I possibly traverse? My answer to these questions is simply, as much and as far as it is possible. I don’t want to know my boundaries. But I do need to understand my limitations so I can erase them or at least diminish them considerably.

 

Ultimately this is what I would like to achieve in all my writing, be it poetry, short stories, novels, novellas and of course flash fiction. Having said that, writing and especially my own writing, isn’t just about me; it’s true worth lies in how many people it can touch even momentarily. My writing’s ultimate worth lies in how long it can stay inside a human mind other than my own. Ultimately, that’s the kind of writer I want to be. And this is where learning to write the perfect or near perfect flash will illumine my path.

 

 

 (A slightly different version of this entry is here : http://rumjhumkbiswas.wordpress.com/2009/01/28/whither-do-i-go-now-with-my-flashes-in-the-pan/)

 

 

Rumjhum Biswas’s fiction and poetry have been published in all the five continents, in print as well as online journals and anthologies. She has won prizes for poetrry in India and was long listed in the Bridport Poetry Prize in 2006. She blogs at htt://rumjhumkbiswas.wordpress.com