The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story [1 ed.] 2022027187, 2022027188, 9780826364739, 9780826364746

Table of contents :
Cover Page
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Foreword
Introduction: Going Long. Going Short.
Chapter 1. Thirteen Ways of Looking at Flash Fiction
Chapter 2. The Freedom of Constraints
Chapter 3. Telling a Story in Fragments
Chapter 4. The Erotics of Brevity
Chapter 5. Context: How Much Is Enough?
Chapter 6. The Fullness of Omission
Chapter 7. White Spaces
Chapter 8. Plotting in Miniature (and with a Slant)
Chapter 9. Writing Characters in Fleeting Profile
Chapter 10. Writing for the Essence
Chapter 11. The Sounds of Silence
Chapter 12. Found Objects, Found Stories
Chapter 13. Story as Collage
Chapter 14. Going Small to Go Big: The Art of Expansion
Chapter 15. Going Small to Go Small
Chapter 16. The Poetics of Brevity
Chapter 17. Is It Poetry or Prose?
Chapter 18. How Short Can You Go?
Chapter 19. The Mot Juste
Chapter 20. The Sentence
Chapter 21. The Paragraph
Chapter 22. The Title
Chapter 23. The “Flash Novel” and the Novella
Chapter 24. Endings
Acknowledgments
Postscript
One More Postscript
Flashings: Quotes on Writing Short
Appendix: Gleanings from The Art of Brevity

Citation preview

Praise for The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story

“Absolutely essential reading on the power and craft of very short stories. Worth it for the brilliant analysis of narrative and poetics, worth it for Faulkner’s playfulness and obvious joy on the page, worth it for the string of fascinating quotations at the end. A generous book, packed full, it is bound to be a classic.”

—DEB OLIN UNFERTH, author of Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War

“Grant Faulkner, one of our finest practitioners of the very short story, gifts us with this creative, dynamic craft book. The Art of Brevity is absorbing, whimsical, and filled with the eclectic wisdom of writers, artists, and musicians who have created with an aesthetic of brevity and omission. But finally, it is Faulkner’s unique, personal view on the subject of condensing short prose—as he telescopes into the fascinating ‘cracks and crevices’ of brevity—that makes this book a must-have for every writer’s shelf.”

—TARA LYNN MASIH, author of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field

“What a wonderful book for writers and readers of short stories! Part craft, part meditation on form, it’s entirely delightful, practical, and will leave any reader with a deeper appreciation of flash fiction.”

—AMBER SPARKS, author of And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges

“In this manic world of noise and delirium, our ability to comprehend reality bends toward chaos. In brief cracks of lucidity, we scramble, hungry to purchase happiness or at least consciousness. This text is a mighty testament to the zeitgeist, an important recognition of flash as art, and a needle into our selfawareness, reflection, and clarity.”

—VENITA BLACKBURN, author of How to Wrestle a Girl: Stories

The Art of Brevity

The Art of Brevity

Crafting the Very Short Story

Grant Faulkner

Foreword by Megan Giddings

University of New Mexico Press Albuquerque

© 2023 by Grant Faulkner All rights reserved. Published 2023 Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Faulkner, Grant, author. Title: The art of brevity: crafting the very short story / Grant Faulkner. Description: Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2022027187 (print) | LCCN 2022027188 (e-book) | ISBN 9780826364739 (paperback) | ISBN 9780826364746 (e-pub) Subjects: LCSH: Short story. Classification: LCC PN3373 . F38 2023 (print) | LCC PN3373 (e-book) | DDC 808.3/1—dc23/eng/20220914 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027187 LC e-book record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027188

Founded in 1889, the University of New Mexico sits on the traditional homelands of the Pueblo of Sandia. The original peoples of New Mexico— Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache—since time immemorial have deep connections to the land and have made significant contributions to the broader community statewide. We honor the land itself and those who remain stewards of this land throughout the generations and also acknowledge our committed relationship to Indigenous peoples. We gratefully recognize our history.

Various excerpts from The Book of Haikus by Jack Kerouac. © 1958 by Jack Kerouac. Used by permission of the Wylie Agency LLC. All rights reserved.

“In my medicine cabinet,” “A bird on,” “The summer chair,” “Two Japanese boys,” and “Bird suddenly quiet” from The Book of Haikus by Jack Kerouac, edited and with an Introduction by Regina Weinreich. © 2003 by the Estate of Stella Kerouac, John Sampas, Literary Representative. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

“In a Station of the Metro,” from Personae by Ezra Pound. © 1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp and Faber & Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.

Designed by Felicia Cedillos Composed in Minion Pro 10/14

Blessed be moments, millimeters and, even humbler than these, the shadows of all tiny things.

—FERNANDO PESSOA

CONTENTS

Foreword MEGAN GIDDINGS

Introduction: Going Long. Going Short.

Chapter 1. Thirteen Ways of Looking at Flash Fiction

Chapter 2. The Freedom of Constraints

Chapter 3. Telling a Story in Fragments

Chapter 4. The Erotics of Brevity

Chapter 5. Context: How Much Is Enough?

Chapter 6. The Fullness of Omission

Chapter 7. White Spaces

Chapter 8. Plotting in Miniature (and with a Slant)

Chapter 9. Writing Characters in Fleeting Profile

Chapter 10. Writing for the Essence

Chapter 11. The Sounds of Silence

Chapter 12. Found Objects, Found Stories

Chapter 13. Story as Collage

Chapter 14. Going Small to Go Big: The Art of Expansion

Chapter 15. Going Small to Go Small

Chapter 16. The Poetics of Brevity

Chapter 17. Is It Poetry or Prose?

Chapter 18. How Short Can You Go?

Chapter 19. The Mot Juste

Chapter 20. The Sentence

Chapter 21. The Paragraph

Chapter 22. The Title

Chapter 23. The “Flash Novel” and the Novella

Chapter 24. Endings

Acknowledgments

Postscript

One More Postscript

Flashings: Quotes on Writing Short

Appendix: Gleanings from The Art of Brevity

FOREWORD

MEGAN GIDDINGS

Flash fiction is my favorite prose to read. At its best, the level of love for words and sentences makes me inspired. I love being in the presence of other writers who care so much about the line, the right word, the feeling of being flown away by language. Maybe the best compliment I can give The Art of Brevity is that it made me want to write. It gave me that carried away by language fizzy feeling. It also made me reconsider a lot of my ideas about compression and expansion in flash fiction because Grant approaches techniques throughout this text not in a firm, proscriptive way but through play, through metaphor, in addition to his rigorous close-reading and explanations. I think the hardest skill for a writer to cultivate is understanding the relationship between expansion and compression in their work. A story and its more concrete elements like characterization or plot or language are, of course, deeply important. In some stories, authors choose to expand each element to take in as much of the world they envision is possible. On the other hand, compression tends to be where writers take the conversation about flash fiction. The usual conversations around flash is that every element must be distilled, the language must be perfect, your eye as a writer has to be focused on the exact way to create a character in a sentence or three. But let’s consider an element that’s intuitive and harder to quantify, one that’s necessary to building a voice and style: balance. This isn’t to say that all stories should be perfectly even and spaced out and cohere to a three-act structure. Balance in storytelling comes from knowing which elements or ideas need to be emphasized to lead your readers toward understanding what you’re communicating in a particular story. So, here’s a writing exercise for you to try on your way into this book, where you’re going to learn so much about compression, characterization, language, and time. For this exercise we’ll use “Little Red Riding Hood” as the focus story.

In case the story is unfamiliar to you, here's a brief summary that strips away the fairy tale elements: A young girl is tasked with doing an errand that will take her out into the world alone. She meets a stranger, does not seem to comprehend that they’re dangerous, and gives them information. The stranger runs to her grandmother’s home, eats the grandmother, and then attacks and kills the main character. It’s a story that teaches lessons about recognizing predators, giving away information, and navigating the world. In this exercise, I want you to think a lot about what you emphasize. I want you to write three versions of this story that the techniques and ideas of this book will help you refine later. Remember, none of these should go over a thousand words. Version One: Most of the story is a beautiful, lush description of Little Red Riding Hood walking through a beautiful forest. Make your readers understand the smells, the sights, the sounds. The forest should dominate the story. Version Two: Most of the story is Little Red Riding Hood’s mother giving her the directions about doing her errand. Emphasize the mother’s concerns, the reasons why the mother trusts or feels like she should trust her daughter in the world. Version Three: Most of the story is the chaos at the grandmother’s house and the aftermath. This in some ways will seem like the easiest version, but it’s also the hardest to accomplish without making it feel exploitative. How do you find a character, make them real, and not make the violence and the feeling of it the most important element of your story? After you write all three take notes on how each version is different. They all have the same seed, but the things that you expanded and emphasized changed the story radically. Then, put all three of these in a drawer. Read this book. Do all the wonderful exercises that are waiting for you—a personal favorite of mine is “Writing in Shards” on page 36. And then, come back to your three retellings in the drawer. Revise, revise, revise.

The Art of Brevity

Introduction

Going Long. Going Short.

HOW DID A WRITER immersed in a lifelong training regimen to be a novelist find his aesthetic (and find himself) in brevity? Like many, when I first became a writer, I thought the end goal of writing was that big behemoth of a saga called the “Great American Novel,” no matter the absurdity of questing after such a holy grail. I thought the best way to understand the endless ribbons of America’s highways, the gritty streets of our cities, and the oozing boundaries of our suburbia, resided in an ever-expansive aesthetic of maximalist comprehensiveness, full of crisscrossing tentacles of story lines and sentences bursting with syntactic curlicues. Our souls sprawl with this land, after all. Think of the labyrinthine universe of David Foster Wallace, the dense weight of William Faulkner’s past (which I share only literarily, not genetically), or Saul Bellow’s overflowing, burbling prose (yes, it must be noted that an aesthetic of bigness, not to mention the notion of the “Great American Novel” itself, tends to come from men). I started out writing short stories, as most fiction writers do, but I wrote them as if passing through the minor leagues on my way to the big leagues. As much as I admired the spare minimalism of Raymond Carver or Amy Hempel, short stories were primarily vehicles to learn how to write longer and bigger. They were like novels with training wheels, I suppose. A stage to get through on the way to the real stuff. The big stuff. “More” is a key word in learning to write. We level up as writers, writing longer papers and using bigger words and longer sentence constructions at each academic stage because we’re taught that serious, sophisticated thoughts need more of everything to be conveyed. Most of my writing life has been a training ground of “more,” in fact, so I rarely conceived of writing less. Even when I got my MFA, in many of the creative-writing workshops I took I frequently heard

the comment, “I want to know more about _____.” More characterization, more backstory, more details—more of everything. Rarely did anyone advise places to cut or condense or write less. And I gave similar feedback, as if being tapped on the knee with a doctor’s rubber hammer. None of us stopped to ask if this “more” added to the story or if it was just a passing curiosity of the reader’s, a need to have the story spelled out instead of imagined. It seemed that the “more” addressed a flaw, something overlooked, something flimsy and insubstantial. So I wrote longer and longer short stories, and then I wrote longer and longer novels, trying to fill in gaps, not open them. But then, while working on one of these novels—a novel I’d been working on off-and-on for ten years—a friend of mine, Paul Strohm, wrote a memoir, Sportin’ Jack, consisting of 100 one-hundred-word stories. He modeled the form as if writing with a fixed-lens camera, with the idea that an arbitrary limit inspired compositional creativity. I tried my hand at writing such tiny stories because I like to experiment, and I also needed a break from my behemoth of a novel, which had not only begun to weigh down my creativity but weigh down my life as well. I learned that the short form is beguiling. Since it’s so short, it would seem to be easier, but in my initial forays I couldn’t come anywhere close to the onehundred-word mark. At best, I could chisel a story down to 150 words, and I was so frustrated by the gobs of material I’d left out that I didn’t see a way to go farther. I told Paul that I’d written several stories as short as 150 words, and I told him I was pleased with that level of brevity, but instead of approbation, I received disapproval. He chided me to keep going farther, to trust that my story would actually get better as I cut it down. I didn’t quite trust that, but I kept going. The one-hundred-word form had become a riddle to solve. My failure at concision made me reflect on my writing habits. I began to think of how the chants of “more, more, more” I’d heard in my writing workshops were often the single least helpful bit of feedback, impinging upon the vaporous whorls of suspense and necessary reserve that are integral to good storytelling, no matter the form. I’d trained myself to write through backstories, layers of details, and thickets of connections, but the more I pared my prose to reach 100 words, a different kind of storytelling presented itself. The art of brevity. The art of excision. The art of compression. The art of omission. The art of spaces and gaps and breaths. The art of less.

Such an art finds itself at the center of flash fiction, which is defined as a story under a thousand words and goes by many names, including “short-shorts,” “miniatures,” “sudden fiction,” “hint fiction,” “postcard fiction,” and “post-it fiction,” among others. Flash communicates via caesuras and crevices. There is no asking more, no premise of comprehensiveness, because flash fiction is a form that privileges excision over agglomeration, adhering more than any other narrative form to Ernest Hemingway’s famous iceberg dictum: only show the top one-eighth of your story and leave the rest below water to be conjured. A onehundred-word story might only show the top 1 percent of your story. Flash is a type of border crossing into a different land of storytelling, especially the “short-shorts” of the world of micro fiction (stories less than four hundred words). For one, flash is a form that naturally holds transience. Julio Ortega says in the flash series he calls Diario imaginario that he prefers to write them with cheap hotel pens because of the feeling of “provisional, momentary writing.” The writer Leesa Cross-Smith says flash stories “are here and they are gone … we’re talking not much room for backstory, we’re talking drive-thru stories and quickies and pit stops and sneaky, stolen kisses and breathless sprints and gotta go.” In his fifty-two-word story “Lint,” Richard Brautigan ponders the events of his childhood and compares them to lint, “pieces of a distant life that have no form or meaning.” Except that by capturing these small, intense moments we’re elevating the lintlike stories of our lives into something much more. The flash form speaks to the singularity of such stray moments by calling attention to the spectral blank spaces around them. Flash allows stories to capture the running water of the everyday. Suddenly, the strain of music heard faintly from the next apartment becomes the reason for a story itself. Brevity allows us to get close to the unsayable, to know something that is beyond words or the wordless moments words bring us to. Brevity is a tool and an experience. It’s a way of being, and, as such, it helps us live. Life tends to become habitual. We are automatic creatures in some ways. The aesthetic of brevity helps return us to direct sensation. It heightens attention, recasting life with vividness. We realize the contradictory significance of things. Or the harmonious significance of things. Or both. It’s a little like falling in love. It’s a little like noticing the first slant of the autumn sun. It’s a little like that moment of waking from a powerful dream and finding yourself in real life. An aesthetic is our lens upon the world, so our aesthetic holds an existential

position. Often the word aesthetic is seen as focused on determining the beauty of an object, and an aesthete is seen as someone who is removed from real life, immersed in art, perhaps even decadently so. I’d love to open up the definition of what aesthetic means and focus less on its subjective or superficial traits and more on how an aesthetic is a framework to express and understand life. The Greek term aisthesis means sensual perception, so an aesthetic is rooted in the feeling of experience. An aesthetic offers an entry point into our relationships with people, objects, events, environments, the past, the present, the future, and even the political structures in which we are all enmeshed. An aesthetic might seem distant from a belief system or a faith, yet an aesthetic forms the foundation for how a story or belief is expressed. An aesthetic is a conversation. Our aesthetic determines how we experience life and how we express it. For example, Sadia Quraeshi Shepard says that the aesthetic of the fragment shapes the diverse histories, homelands, and literary traditions she finds herself in: “In my own writing life, the idea of the fragment and how it might suggest the fractures and dislocations of memories and border-crossings is a recurring fascination.” Life isn’t a round, complete circle—it’s shaped by fragments, shards, and pinpricks. It’s a collage of snapshots, a collection of the unspoken, an attic full of situations you can’t quite get rid of. The brevity of flash is perfect for capturing the small but telling moments when life pivots almost unnoticeably, yet profoundly. For me, the fragments of tiny stories perfectly capture the disconnections that I am fascinated by in life, whether it’s the gulf between a loved one, the natural world, or God. I don’t want a form that represents comprehensiveness or unity because that’s an aesthetic at odds with my experience of life. “If a reader desires full dramatization of every dramatizable moment, he or she should read a novel, which is about expansion; flash fiction is about ambiguity,” said Nathan Leslie. Ambiguity is an unheralded gift of brevity. Society, of course, likes definite, tangible answers—scientific proofs, algorithms that dissect data, sensors that guide self-driving cars—but so much of life resides in ambiguity. Do I love her? Do they love me? Why did she say this? What did he mean by that? We live in the ephemera of riddles.

Such moments invite a different sort of treatment. As I honed my sensibility of brevity by paring my stories down to one hundred words, I learned that each line of a miniature story must carry a symbolic weight that moves the story forward. Yet, at the same time, the gaps within and around the story speak as largely as the text itself. “The words of the last line should create a silence, a white space in which the reader breathes. The story enters that breath, and continues,” writes Jayne Anne Phillips. Because short-shorts speak to what’s left out, because they often border on prose poetry, the reader needs to pause, reflect, and fill in the gaps—to be a cocreator, essentially, in contrast to being swept along in the gushes and rushes of the stream of words that formed my earlier maximalist approach. In fact, the short form requires a deeper humility from the writer. You’re writing not to draw attention to yourself, as some works do with verbal flourishes or stylistic panache, but to serve the story in all of its nuances, searching for exactly the right word to work in such a tiny space. A short-short exists on a different plane. Some think such fragmentary brevity makes this Twitter and Facebook era perfect for flash fiction because its shortness fits snugly into the flitting attention spans of Internet readers, and there’s a truth in that, but a well-crafted short-short demands not to be read quickly but to be read multiple times, with the attention one brings to a poem. Flash stories aren’t meant to serve short attention spans just like haikus weren’t meant to serve short attention spans. Quite the opposite. You can say that flash prolongs perception and causes you to pause. Flash actually cuts through distraction and holds the possibility of returning the reader —and yourself as writer—to a more focused and intense reading experience. There are still some stodgy critics who say flash fiction is a passing fad of our digitally obsessed times, and until recently it has struggled to be taken seriously by academia and by what I’ll call “the establishment literary world” (and it’s still not revered by critics with the same gravitas as the novel or embraced by the bigger publishers as being commercially viable). I’ve always wondered if somehow the word “flash” minimizes the seriousness of the form because flash’s connotations range from “flash sales” to “flash mobs” or even just the word “flashy.” Hardly literary. Flash is in a paradoxical position: it’s both marginalized and popular. It’s like Cinderella, banned from going to the ball, yet at the ball (and waiting for its glass slipper). But times are changing, and the form has begun to establish itself, being taught more widely in classrooms and

becoming the subject of an increasing number of anthologies. An aesthetic of brevity is emerging in novels as well, with the recent publication of novels that are formed around snippets, snapshots, and linked shorts, like Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation or Justin Torres’s We the Animals. It’s interesting, though, how an aesthetic of bigness still rules. In response to the rise of these novels, which some call “the novel in flash,” literary doyenne Joyce Carol Oates tweeted “strange to have come of age reading great novels of ambition, substance, & imagination (Dostoyevsky, Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner) & now find yourself praised & acclaimed for wan little husks of ‘auto fiction’ with space between paragraphs to make the book seem longer … ” My question is whether “the novel in flash” isn’t just as ambitious as any long novel and whether the “space between paragraphs” isn’t meant to make the book seem longer but to function artfully as space does in a Helen Frankenthaler painting, or silence in a John Cage composition, or the play of positive and negative space in Anish Kapoor’s sculpture (and let’s remember what Miles Davis said about jazz: “It’s not the notes you play; it’s the notes you don’t play.”). So … “wan little husks”? I beg to differ. In fact, an aesthetic of brevity isn’t just for works of brevity. When I write long, I’m also writing short, not writing for “maximalist comprehensiveness” but focusing on what words can be carved from sentences and how paragraphs and chapters can move with hints rather than divulgences. I conceive of creating spaces around the chapters of my novel instead of cramming those spaces with skeins of connecting text. I feel a deep, even ecstatic pleasure when I shave entire pages away from a draft, as if I’ve cleaned out a messy closet. I think often of Roland Barthes’s question in Pleasure of the Text: “Is not the most erotic portion of the body where the garment gapes?” It’s an apt metaphor for flash fiction because these tiny stories flow from tantalizing glimpses that lure the reader forward. One might posit that short-shorts are the most natural storytelling form—that if a goal of literature is to reach the greatest degree of mimesis, then the flash form delivers verisimilitude in a way longer forms don’t. “Most stories we tell in real life are under 500 words,” said Rebecca Makkai. “You’re at a party, everyone has a glass of wine, and suddenly you have the floor. You throw out your little story like a grenade.”

Raymond Carver, a notable “minimalist” of the short-story form, tried unsuccessfully to write novels early in his career. But not every writer is wired for the length of a novel just as not every writer is wired to write miniatures. Carver said he lacked the attention span, the patience to write a novel. I suppose you could call this a weakness, but he decided it was a strength. “Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications,” he said, and his specifications followed the principles of brevity. By focusing on shorter stories and poems, he was able to nurture something that he said every writer needs beyond talent: “a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking.” If Carver had pursued the “Great American Novel,” then he might not have been attuned to his special way of seeing, and he would have certainly been in the wrong context for its expression. “Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on,” he said. The lesson: if you write small, don’t worry about writing big. Now I rarely think of what I call “the more” when I revise a story or when I give feedback on an early draft of another’s work, but instead I focus on “the less.” Ghosts are good for writing, I’ve learned, so I’ve invited them in. Our lives are as much about the unspoken as the spoken. We live in the gaps, the white spaces. In some ways, this book lives in the gaps as well. This isn’t a craft book so much as it is a meditation on the aesthetic of brevity as it’s used in many different forms of art, but with a special focus on flash fiction (which I refer to with many names: miniatures, short-shorts, shorts, and more). Most craft books say the primary elements of fiction are character, setting, and plot, but I think it’s worth questioning whether that’s true. Rhythm, spatiality, and texture seem as important to me. Mood. Tone. That ineffable sense of voice (or perhaps it’s more appropriately called “being”). The aesthetic of brevity invites questions about the conventions of storytelling: What are the elements of a story that matter? I don’t want to disparage traditional craft books, because I like thinking about character, setting, and plot, but I am leery of a prescriptiveness that seems embedded in their very definition. If a story’s purpose is illumination (to “delight and instruct” as Horace said two thousand years ago), then my question is, What is the path to illumination? Is “path” in fact the wrong word, especially when it comes to the reshaping of narrative that an aesthetic of flash invites? I don’t want to prove a point in this book or offer a blueprint so much as I simply want

to offer some thoughts on an aesthetic that forms my sensibility. We write mainly through a sensibility, after all. To nourish an aesthetic of brevity and open up its possibilities to be a vessel of expression according to your own sensibility, I’ve started this book with the chapter “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Flash Fiction.” To write flash, you’ll likely need your words to sprout in a different sized pot, so it’s good to visualize a narrative with different metaphors in mind. I’ve also included exercises at the ends of chapters that you can try if you wish. Some of these are specific to the form and others are more conceptual. My thinking is that these might aid you in forming thoughts about your own writing practice and aesthetics. There is no need to read the book in linear fashion, and, in fact, I’d advise you to flip through it and read random chapters or just read the snippets of text that reach out to you. The best way to understand the big story is through a lot of little stories. I hope this book illuminates the stories in those gaps and in the white spaces of life and on the page for you. I hope it will be a pathway to the beauties of succinctness and constraints—that you’ll discover the big worlds that exist in tiny spaces. I hope you’ll try your hand at all of the different forms nested within the genre of flash fiction and that, like me, even when you’re writing in a long form, you’ll know the power of writing less.

CHAPTER 1

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Flash Fiction

I usually compare the novel to a mammal, be it wild as a tiger or tame as a cow; the short story to a bird or a fish; the microstory to an insect (iridescent in the best cases).

—LUISA VALENZUELA

AN INTERVIEWER ONCE ASKED me, “If flash fiction were an animal, which animal would it be?” I considered a chicken because you can peck at the stories. Perhaps a badger because short-shorts sometimes have to be more tenacious than their larger brethren. I thought a fish was apt because tiny stories often swim together. I almost decided upon a cat because a cat can fit perfectly in your lap, and even as you pet it and listen to its purrs, it stares at you with a mysterious menace. In the end, I decided upon a coyote that appears in your backyard and stares into your kitchen window. You lock eyes, and the world is suddenly a little dangerous, a little less predictable. Perhaps my favorite metaphor for flash stories, though, comes from flash master Molly Giles: they are fireflies, flickering in the darkness of a summer night. The definition of numinous, otherworldly beauty. Ephemeral and captivating at once. Of all the forms of fiction, flash fiction is the only one whose name is itself a metaphor. As James Thomas, the editor of several seminal anthologies of flash fiction, tells the story, he was talking with his wife, Denise, about what to call these short stories of under a thousand words. He’d been calling them “blasters,” but that moniker didn’t ring with any poetic allure. Right at that moment, a bolt

of lightning struck, and the night lit up with a flash. “Call them flash,” Denise said. And the name of a genre was born. The irony is that flash, despite being the smallest of fictional forms, breeds subgenres and an ever-flowing list of new names. Flash stories are often called miniatures, short-shorts, or postcard stories. There is the drabble (stories that are exactly one hundred words), the dribble (also known as the “minisaga” at fifty words), micro-fiction (stories under four hundred words), and hint fiction (stories under twenty-five words). And then there’s Twitterature (stories the length of, yes, a tweet), three-minute stories (self-explanatory), and six-word stories. All of these different names—these forms nested within one other like a series of Russian dolls—support a theory of mine: constraints don’t limit creativity; they spark new layers of creativity, each layer subtly different, nuanced, unique. Writing with a metaphor in mind can help you conceive of and shape a story. Here are thirteen more metaphors for flash fiction, which I hope illuminate the form in similar ways as that lightning bolt did years ago.

1. Dorothy Parker said, “Brevity is the soul of lingerie.” A flash story is the lingerie itself: an invitation to come hither, a promise, a hint.

2. A short-short is a tiny island, created from an unknown eruption at the earth’s crust, enhanced by the expanse of the sea around it.

3. Flash fiction is the moment a turtle pokes its head out of its shell.

4. Flash fiction is an afternoon nap. Short. Dreamy. A respite from a tough day. A strange and intriguing interlude. And when you wake up, you’re in a different state.

5. Flash fiction is the moment you hit the brakes.

6. Flash fiction is a brook flowing through the woods. It’s easy to step over, and it’s not big enough to be on any map, but then when you pause to observe it, you see life teeming within it.

7. Flash fiction is the tip of a needle.

8. Flash fiction is a bonsai tree, compressed yet sculpted to create movement, proportion, and poignancy. Some trees slant. Some trees cascade. Some are windswept or weeping.

9. Flash fiction is a rare seashell you find on the beach. It’s delicate, yet it’s traveled though many waters only to be left on the shore, a found object.

10. Flash fiction is the faint rustling of a ghost, present yet absent, alive yet dead. It has something to tell you, but you have to listen in a different way.

11. Flash fiction is a submarine, able to go to places beneath the surface of life in a way that other boats can’t.

12. Flash fiction is a pill: small and seemingly harmless, yet full of powerful substances that might heal, might kill—or might just alter your senses.

13. Flash fiction is the light of a sparkler, spritzing dashes of light into the air for only a minute.

There are many more metaphors, of course. I’ve heard flash fiction compared to a snow globe. You can peer into a strange miniature world, you can hold it in your hand, and with one simple shake, the world changes. Flash is a cooking extract or a homeopathic remedy. It’s the rich soil, the silt, found in a river’s delta. Dr. Seuss was entranced by the possibilities of tiny worlds. In Horton Hears a Who!, Horton the Elephant hears a small speck of dust talking to him, and he discovers that the speck is actually a tiny planet, home to a community called Whoville, where microscopic creatures called Whos live (and presumably read tiny stories). Flash allows for drama that floats in the air like a dust mote, but, as Lia Purpura wrote in her essay “On Miniatures,” the miniature isn’t just a smaller version of something larger.

Miniatures transcend their size, like small-but-vicious dogs; dense chunks of fudge, espresso, a drop of mercury, a parasite. Miniatures do nothing less than alter our sense of, and relation to time and space. Finally, and most strangely to me, miniatures are radically self-sufficient. The beings who inhabit fairylands, those elves and sprites, pixies and trolls, don’t usually strive to be our pals. They’re distant and go about their business. They don’t need us. Their smallness is our problem, or intrigue, or desire. They don’t need us, and thus we are drawn to them—as any smitten lover might be, to a beloved who remains so close and yet just out of reach.

Perhaps there are so many ways to describe flash fiction because of the many things it does. As the poet Mark Strand said,

It is condensed, even curt; its rhythms are fleeting, its languor quick, its majesty diminutive. It discredits accretions, honors reduction, and refuses to ramble. Its identity is exceptional, its appetite exclusive. It is refractory, rapid, runtish. It reverses, refutes, revises. It can do in a page what a novel does in two hundred. It covers years in less time, time in almost no time. It wants to deliver us where we were before we began. Its aim is restorative, to keep us young. It thrives on selfeffacement, and generates statements, on its own behalf, that are shorn or short. Its end is erasure.

The beauty of a firefly’s light is not how it illuminates the world, as the sun does, but in how it illuminates the darkness. Sometimes it takes the smallest of things to open up the biggest of spaces.

Flashpoint: Create Your Flash Metaphor

It’s your time now. What’s your metaphor for a short-short? Create an image or choose one from above, then reflect on what you’ve chosen. Why did this image resonate with you, and what does it say about what you find important in flash fiction and in your writing in general? What other metaphors did you consider, and why didn’t they hold true? This metaphor can be your writing guide, a type of promise stone, although it may evolve or change altogether as you and your writing evolve. In fact, as you read this book and write your own stories, see if your metaphor changes for different lengths or different types of stories. Your mental model for a story can be just a flash in time, after all.

CHAPTER 2

The Freedom of Constraints

I guess the challenge has always been for me, the most interesting challenge is how do you take a constraint and turn it into an opportunity to make something really unique in the world?

—MEEJIN YOON

CAN YOU WRITE A novel in a single page? This was the challenge my writing professor Robert Glück posed in his experimental writing class. It was an odd, demanding, seemingly impossible premise. He said it shouldn’t be a mere summary of plot, a simple rundown of “This happened, then that happened,” but that we should think about what a novel is and then try to capture a novel’s essence in a single page. It was initially an off-putting assignment to me as a young writer who hadn’t practiced compression or thought about it much. In fact, in the writing classes I’d taken before then, the majority of both teacher and student feedback was to write more, to expand the short story with more detail. I wanted to write a novel that was a novel, a novel that aspired to heftiness and expanded to its outer limits, a novel that weighed in at hundreds of pages. The more pages the better, in fact. I was reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notebooks at the time, which consisted of a lifetime of observations and snippets that he’d categorized under different topics, and I decided to collect an assortment of my favorite lines and stitch them together into a single story, a sort of collage. As I moved sentences around and

positioned them for dramatic effect, I began to realize that each sentence functioned almost like a chapter. The weave of images, the suspense that the gaps in the story created, formed the feeling of a sweeping narrative arc. I learned that if I communicated the essence of a story well enough, I didn’t have to excavate all of its layers or provide connective tissue and explanation. I learned that “more” isn’t necessarily the direction to go in to tell the full story. Most novels tend to widen their reach because expansion is in their DNA. A novel is like a Southwestern city. You have so much land to build on that you can just keep building farther outward, relishing the sprawl and disregarding any notion of compactness (a potential hazard of urban planning and novel writing). Writing a short-short is more like building a tiny town hemmed in by mountains and the sea: You have to be very careful with each element you add. You have to eliminate excess. You have to be more intentional in the ways you construct each building and street. Whereas a novelist is a spinner of tales, a miniaturist prefers to whittle things down in search of the perfect contour. Sylvia Plath called poetry a “tyrannical discipline” for the tightness of its boundaries: “You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.” But it’s the tyranny of the discipline that brings out the creativity. Think of different poetic forms, whether it’s a sonnet, a villanelle, or a haiku. These “boxes” make the creative act more difficult, yet the requirements of a form force the writer to look beyond obvious associations and consider different words that fit into the rhyming or iambic scheme. Imaginative leaps don’t necessarily happen by thinking “outside the box” as the popular saying goes, but within the box. For decades the dominant view among psychologists was that constraints served as a barrier to creativity, but recent studies show that when people hold the free reins of abundance, they often follow the path of least resistance and rely on commonplace ways of thinking. When dealing with a constraint, though, people are forced to think in less conventional ways. Constraints force you to think differently. “Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini,” said the poet Paul Muldoon. A straitjacket wasn’t truly a straitjacket for Houdini. It was a space that forced him to explore his body in different ways, to realize different possibilities for movement. “Some say I do it this way, others say I do it that way, but I say I do it the other way,” said Houdini. When writing

within a tight constraint, you have to look for the “other way” to do it. The concept of writing a story within confines has spawned a number of forms that strip down the conventional elements of a story. On the shorter side, there are six-word stories and 280-character stories (“Twiction”), or stories written on a postcard or a Post-it. If you want to put restrictions on your word choice, there’s an abecedarius, an alphabet story in which the first letter of every word follows the order of the alphabet, or the first word of each sentence follows the alphabet. You can write a lipogram, a story that omits a particular letter or group of letters, usually a vowel. James Thurber wrote “The Wonderful O,” a fairy tale in which villains ban the letter o from use by the inhabitants of the island of Oooroo. Peter Carey decided not to use any commas in his book True History of the Kelly Gang. Robert Olen Butler wrote each of the sixty-two short-shorts in Severance around the remaining ninety seconds of conscious awareness within human heads after they have been decapitated. French Oulipo writers felt constraints could be freeing, that overtly imposing them was a way to acknowledge the constraints on writing everywhere and also search for new structures and patterns of expression. Oulipo stands for “ouvroir de littérature potentielle,” which roughly means, “workshop of potential literature.” The group was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau (a writer fascinated by science) and François Le Lionnais (a scientist fascinated by writing), and other notable members included novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino. Queneau believed that literature is always confined by something, no matter the muse. “Inspiration which consists in blind obedience to every impulse is in reality a sort of slavery,” he said. So the Oulipians embraced a type of literary bondage by designing confining narrative techniques, like lipograms and palindromes, with the idea that the rules of their bondage would paradoxically lead to liberation (Queneau described Oulipians as “rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape”). The group’s new methods tested story construction with a surrealist’s sense of whimsical randomness, welcoming the awkward and the disjointed even while forming the method around mathematical games. For example, in an exercise called “N + 7,” the writer has to replace every noun in a text with the seventh noun after it in a dictionary. In a “Snowball,” a poem is constructed in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer. One of my favorites is Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes, which uses the structure of a flip-book, a children’s picture book in which each page is cut into

horizontal strips that can be matched or mismatched in many combinations. Queneau used this technique to “write” poetry: the book contains ten sonnets, each on a page, and each page is split into fourteen strips, one for each line. Queneau boasts in the introduction that it would take approximately 190,258,751 years to read all possible combinations (but I don’t trust his math). With all of these different forms available, I think of the various forms of flash fiction as a series of differently sized pots. One pot is big enough to hold a Ficus tree. Another pot is so small that it can only hold a tiny succulent. In fact, the art of compression in flash fiction is similar to that practiced in the art of bonsai, where a tree is grown in a shallow pot and shaped to look like a mature tree through various horticultural and aesthetic disciplines. The goal of classical bonsai is to produce a healthy miniature representation of a tree that dramatizes the essence of a tree. According to Japanese tradition, the bonsai represents the three virtues, or shin-zen-bi, which translates into truth, goodness, and beauty. The art of bonsai is a type of storytelling, mixing form, thought, and suggestion. “I want to express the tree’s inner beauty. So I am watching the way that the trunk and branches move,” said bonsai artist Kunio Kobayashi. As with flash fiction, confinement is a guiding principle in bonsai, and the tree is in artistic conversation with the container that holds it. The challenge is how to maintain a healthy plant within such constraints. The key is in being able to control the degree of stress that a plant will take and still remain healthy. “Stress” here refers to the horticultural practice of being able to know how much is too much and how much is too little—how much air, water, soil, sun, nutrients, temperature, and pruning are optimal. Writing shorts is also about finding the right degree of stress. Each element of a story holds pressure and tension in its compression. You’re not tossing wildflower seeds to the wind as you are with a novel but focusing on a single plant, a single piece of soil. A master bonsai artist uses wire like a painter uses a brush to position a branch’s growth and then styles the tree through constant attention and trimming. The use of wires and hooks might seem as if they force the shape of a tree upon it, but the good bonsai artist doesn’t foist a narrative on a tree so much as they find it within the tree. “Listen to the tree; it tells you where it wants to go,” said the master John Naka. Any writer knows you can say the same about a story.

A bonsai tree is full of drama, as if living a story. Naka says he looks for “the smallest tree within the tree.” It’s an art focused on finding a tree’s essence, its soul, to express an aspect of “mono no aware,” a Japanese term that means literally “the pathos of things,” an awareness of the ephemeral nature of beauty. A well-crafted tree holds a tranquility and harmony that supersedes a fully grown tree found in nature because the essence of a tree has been given a stage. Bonsai is a practice based on not just miniaturization but on creating proportion, asymmetry, and movement to create poignancy. “Bonsai art is the display of a landscape—without the landscape,” said the bonsai artist Nobu Kajiwara. This is the perfect description for how I wrote that one-page novel years ago, and it certainly speaks to how I write a one-hundred-word story. When I first began trying to write one-hundred-word stories, practicing and practicing at trying to get them to exactly one hundred words, with each attempt I discovered how the condensation of a one-hundred-word story could open up the irreducible mystery of a single intense moment. I learned how to conjure my characters into three-dimensional figures from a single gesture, a turn of phrase, the sparest of details. I learned how tone, diction, and timbre can guide a story as much as a rising narrative trajectory of actions. I learned how to write a story more as a prose poem, with disjunctive splicings, slivers of moments where an image or a mood carries the story. In fact, many of my stories border on being vignettes or prose poems because the mood of the situation plays nearly as large of a role as any character change. By writing in such a compressed space, I learned how to create spirals of suspense to make the story bigger. The story communicates via caesuras and crevices, and what is omitted can speak as much as the text itself. There is no asking more, no premise of comprehensiveness. I learned how to move a story through wisps of hints as opposed to the connective tissue and comprehensiveness a novel can demand. Now, ironically, I’d say that my novels and longer short stories move to the rhythm of tiny stories as well. I think of my stories moving like a flashlight’s beam, as if the reader is following a series of luminous dots on a path through the night. “There’s possibility in emptiness,” said Carol Guess. “Compression eschews

sentimentality, but it’s not anti-sentiment. Instead, compression narrows an experience, emotion, or image to the point of greatest intensity. I cut unnecessary words in service to music, meaning, and movement. I leave absences for readers to revel in mystery. What’s unsaid becomes the frame for what’s said, just as, in conversation, silence lets you know someone is really listening.” The petri dish of constraint is one that few writers seek out. Within the walls of a constraint, we might feel like a tiger pacing back and forth in a zoo, dreaming of a wilder time without walls around us, but unlike the tiger, we can find benefits that are hidden in our confinement. Barriers can lead to breakthroughs. The magic emerges because of the limitations of the form. Without constraints, we might not feel the piquant pressure that pushes us to find exactly the right word.

Flashpoint: Writing in a Straitjacket

Can you tell a story in just one hundred words? You have to constantly look for the “peripherals to burn”: a word, a sentence, a stray tangent. There isn’t much room for movement, and there is no room for roaming. You have to write with a precision of execution, with a sense of Gustave Flaubert’s mot juste, his principle of searching for exactly the right word. Writing a one-hundred-word story is an exercise in editing as much as it is an exercise in writing. It’s like trying to figure out a Rubik’s cube. You make one move, and then that move forces you to make another. You have to figure out a way to see each cube as part of a larger whole. You have to think about how what’s left out of the story adds to the story. Now it’s time. Write a one-hundred-word story. No more, no less.

CHAPTER 3

Telling a Story in Fragments

I like to deal with fragments. Because no matter what the thought would be if it were fully worked out, it wouldn’t be as good as the suggestion of a thought that the space gives you. Nothing fully worked out could be so arresting, spooky.

—ANNE CARSON

WHAT DO WE RETAIN after reading a novel, whether it’s a bulky tome like War and Peace or a slim novel like The Great Gatsby? We carry fragments, moments, impressions. Our minds erase the weight of text, the lacings of all its connections, and form their own images, with “an assemblage of referents that turns into a parlor game,” as Roland Barthes put it. As a result, there’s no reason a short story can’t seem as large as a long story in memory. Writers trust the solidity of their words, the cohesiveness of the world they create. But readers read through connotation as much as they do through denotation, taking the words elsewhere, weaving memories and emotions and intuitions into the ink of the words on the page. All good fiction has some level of flexibility and is open to shades of interpretation, of course, but the shorter the piece, the sparer the details, the more the reader is required to fill the space. The reader essentially reads in fragments, or at least takes fragments with them as they read, so the writer has to trust in the conjurings of other minds. When I first started trying my hand at short-shorts I wondered, “If fragments define a reading experience, what if they also define the writing experience?” To

write in fragments calls on a different sensibility, a different tactile feel, a different artistry. “So many fragments, so many beginnings, so many pleasures,” Barthes wrote. He understood the seductive nature of a fragment. It’s a wink of the eye, a revelation, a promise. In fragmentary, ambulatory texts, the reader is less involved with a pathway of narrative construction than a series of impressions that open up. Meaning does not give itself as a whole; it lies in the gradual unfolding of signs. To write this way, as Barthes suggests, is to write with a sense of initial attraction and flirtation, to write always in the erotics of the moment. I use the word erotics because I think of fragments as a series of touches on the page. Each moment on the page is a brush, a kiss, a reaching out. If you line fragments up, Barthes wrote, they become part of a song cycle, “each piece self-sufficient, and yet it is never anything but the interstice of its neighbors.” The fragment, like the haiku, implies an immediate delight. “It is a fantasy of discourse, a gaping of desire,” he wrote. The appeal of a fragmentary style of writing isn’t just aesthetic for Barthes; it is existential. He preferred a form that militated against mastery and authority, one that didn’t adhere to a fiction of comprehensiveness and finality. Language and structure for Barthes were always matters of unveiling and discovery, so he favored a language that produced uncertainty and difference, a language that was flexible and didn’t seek to rule and determine, but to open. The glint of understanding flash fiction proffers is humble by definition. Writing with a fragmentary sensibility, with a “linguistics of connotation,” as he put it, is a style of writing that is mistrustful of declarations of truth, preferring images, fantasies, and reverie. In fact, for Barthes, language resembled the shuffling of a kaleidoscope, inviting appreciation of its superficial effects. Barthes recommended reading with “jouissance”—to read with attentiveness to a text’s edges, its gaps, its verticality, its crests—to read “in accordance with pleasure.” “Like the caress, language here remains on the surface of things; the surface is its realm,” he wrote. Objects and words become the equivalent of cutups, a world that requires us to explain it by unfolding its surfaces, unpicking the “stitched squares” of its “rhapsodic quilt.”

Fragments undercut the “cause/effect” narrative. What’s important is the force of the shift, the narrative droppings, the experience of life as what’s left over, as if these pieces of narrative might evaporate. Coherence can only be felt in the moment, and it’s fleeting. Fragmentation supports a view of the world as shattered, pixelated, and momentary. Nothing is fixed, not even time or space, and this imbues life with a looseness, an indefiniteness that weakens certainty or the solid assertion of rules and morality. Life feels more arbitrary in such a narrative. The rondure of experience is no longer so round. Time is out of joint. And yet, for the writer, the creative irony is that fragmentation is formed around ordering. The artist arranges and rearranges. A narrative might feel arbitrary, disordered, even messy, but that is usually an intention. In many ways the art of fragmentation demands more from the writer. It’s easy to convince yourself that you can throw the pages of your story up in the air like the Dadaist Tristan Tzara stirring a hatful of scraps to assemble them randomly to represent the slapdash nature of life, and that can certainly work for some stories, but most of the time we want to unspool tension, escalate suspense, provide even loose threads of structure. Donald Barthelme has a story, “The Glass Mountain,” in which each sentence constitutes a separate, numbered section, as if posing the question of what order means in the midst of disorder, or formally recognizing that there is an author ordering things, even the feeling of randomness itself. K-Ming Chang’s “Footnotes on a Love Story” uses the form of the footnote to decenter the “main” story that’s told in the primary textual space of the page. Instead, in the footnotes, we learn of another love story as we read through a series of lenses that shift the meaning of the story and provide more layers, context, and counterpoints. Footnotes are often skipped over by readers. Even though they’re designed to deepen knowledge of the content, they can also be seen as extras, facts that didn’t earn their way into the main text of a narrative. By design, they exist in the margins. By placing so much of the story in footnotes, Chang asks where the center of the story is, and if, in fact, the “main” story is the main story because the main story becomes a type of footnote itself. If a story is best told in footnotes, then it’s always branching out, connected yet sprawling. It’s a story that lives in between other stories. Writing with the fragment invites in the question of betweenness. A fragment has edges, cracks, seams, and sutures. By being broken apart, it possesses new

boundaries, existing in a liminal state. The form invites an exploration of a situation that lives in between different states of life. Take Veronica Montes’s “Ruby,” a simple story in its premise and its brevity but one that speaks to the betweenness of a dramatic moment. As a mother works on her computer, her daughter Ruby and her boyfriend are having their own private conversation. Ruby is nearly sitting in her boyfriend’s lap, and they’re flipping through an issue of Vogue, pretending to admire the beauty of the models, but they’re really pointing to words to sexually excite one another. “He points to ‘wet,’ she points to ‘hard.’ He finds the word ‘stroke,’ and she runs her finger across ‘shaft.’” Soon they’re pointing at less-loaded words like “melt” or “under,” becoming more aroused as Ruby’s mother looks up from the computer, “eyebrows raised, mouth quirked to one side.” The boy creates an excuse, that he left his phone in his car, and they both go to get it, but they cross a border into a new space of life in doing so. “They stumble out the front door, puppy chasing puppy, and that is the last time that Ruby’s mother sees her because Ruby never comes back, not really. The girl who returns to the house is another creature altogether, blind and groping and fettered to an enormous, feral love.” The story is a single moment. The story is a sliver of time. A fragmentary style of writing is a style of interruption, a form that mirrors the discontinuities of life, the stops and starts, the aimless detours, the small moments of desire and elusive pursuit. Lydia Davis, who might just be the most fragmentary fiction writer in the history of literature, says, “Any interruption, either of our expectations or of the smooth surface of the work itself—either by breaking it off, confusing it, leaving it actually unfinished—foregrounds the work as artifact, as object, rather than as invisible purveyor of meaning, emotion, atmosphere. Constant interruption, fragmentation, also keeps returning the reader not only to the real world but also to a consciousness of his or her own mind at work.” Barthes recognized the consciousness of his mind at work in excavating the grief he felt after his mother died. He wrote notes about his grief on notecards, which were later published as his Mourning Diary. The fragments speak to the formless and drifting nature of grief, the piques and pricks that interrupt time. Grief is a time out of joint. Sadness—and its root in absence—intrudes upon the present.

Grief isn’t something that is cohesive with a beginning, middle, and end; it’s pervasive yet momentary, a series of intrusions. “I am either lacerated or ill at ease and occasionally subject to gusts of life,” Barthes wrote of his grief. Likewise, Edwidge Danticat spoke of how her grief couldn’t be represented by a linear, cohesive narrative but instead took the form of spiraling moments. “I realized that I was thinking in circles when I actually began writing about my mother dying. I avoided the moment itself. I just didn’t want to do it, so I wrote around it.” In fact, we live with absence as much as we live with presence, or absence is a presence, rather, perhaps especially for those who have lost their God. The poet Anne Carson said, “I’ve come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t.” This relationship to the fragmentary nature of God’s existence led Carson to a relationship to a poetics of the fragment, to a study of the fragment through translating Sappho, who might be said to be the accidental original poet of the fragment. Sometime around the ninth century, Sappho’s nine books were lost, and we only have an assortment of scraps, single lines, short quotations, and one complete poem, which Carson translated. If the fragment serves the mimetic goal of a story, the question is why we so often strive to represent a story through a cohesive whole? “To write in fragments is to place stones around the perimeter of a circle,” Barthes wrote. “I spread myself around: my whole little universe in crumbs; at the center, what?” Traditional narrative fiction always works around a center: the main character’s conflict. The character’s journey, the narrative arc, promises a cohesion, an identity moving in clear pursuit and with a directional goal. The stones of such a story aren’t scattered around the perimeter of a circle; the stones create a path that leads to the center. But life isn’t really about a main conflict, the trajectory of desire. It’s about dispersal, things blowing away. Barthes’s question, “at the center, what?” is a question that can be asked over and over again as one gathers together different fragments and arranges them in different configurations. In a story that is decentered in such a way, I can hear the experimental musician

John Cage asking one of his quintessential unanswerable questions: Is silence the interruption of noise, or is noise the interruption of silence? Approaching stories through fragments is akin to composing music. Tone, diction, and timbre guide the story as much as narrative trajectory. A writer is shaping contours of tones, creating a type of soundscape. I think the most meaningful moments of our lives reside in these small pivots and fissures. They aren’t necessarily the kind of moments we can express to others or recount over drinks with friends. They’re the moments we might go to sleep thinking about, moments that rise to the surface on a road trip or a long walk. They’re moments a character in a larger work might fail to truly recognize, or which just don’t fit into a story with such a strong current of a plot line. In writing fragments, a writer becomes an archaeologist, looking for what is missing while sifting through ruins. It’s a different way of reading the world— sensing the whole on the edge of a fragment. As Stuart Dybek described rain in his story “Nighthawks,” “Each drop encases its own separate note, the way each drop engulfs its own blue pearl of light.” Each raindrop is a piece of a whole, the rainstorm, but each drop is also a world unto itself. Think of it like a planarian, a flat worm that, if you cut it into pieces, will grow back into a worm. The fragment is both unto itself and connected to something larger. It’s always growing. Something broken doesn’t necessarily lose its beauty—in fact, it can gain beauty. Like a piece of colored glass found at the beach, its edges smoothed by its time in the water, perhaps the fragment is prettier in this new life. A fragment provides a new angle, a new texture, a new logic. Life is a collection of ruins in the end. We’re all sifting through the remains. By necessity, our aesthetic, our world view, is determined by ruins. The irony, as Lydia Davis points out, is that “any complete picture is an illusion…. A picture that seems less complete may seem less of an illusion, therefore paradoxically more realistic.”

Flashpoint: Writing in Shards

Write a series of seven moments that make up a person’s day. Each moment can offer a subtle or direct comment on the previous moment, or each moment can stand entirely alone and disconnected. The moments can be romantic or mundane, violent or meditative. Think of it like creating a song, each moment a different note, a complement, a crescendo, or a counterpoint. You can link your fragments or think of them as entirely separate, as if a fragment is floating adrift. Then answer these questions for yourself: What do these moments add up to? Is it a “whole” story? Do we need to know what happens between these moments? What kind of characterization do we need? Do you want to make it into a whole story with connective tissue?

CHAPTER 4

The Erotics of Brevity

Is not the most erotic portion of the body where the garment gapes?

—ROLAND BARTHES

LET’S ADD ONE MORE metaphor for the aesthetic of brevity: the gape of the garment. The erotic nature of the gape in a garment is an apt image for the aesthetic of brevity because tiny stories flow from tantalizing glimpses that lure the reader forward. As much as a writer might want to tell the whole story, to achieve comprehensiveness, to possess with the passion of a lover, a good miniature is created around hints and fleeting appearances. The words and images of a short-short are akin to the lingering glance or the brush of a hand from a lover. A good short-short should live in the bliss of its mystery. Writing’s purpose is often meant to explain the oblique, to resolve. But the oblique is one purpose of flash. Flash is the art of the sidelong glance. Desire forms itself around the ambiguous, those feints and teases that keep us captivated by the mere suggestion of future fulfillment. A short-short is similarly erotic—the author calculating just how much and when to touch or reveal. A good writer lures the reader from the first sentence of a story. A question is posed, but not answered. A good author is always allowing peeks into the garment but doesn’t strip off the clothing—or doesn’t do so until exactly the right moment. Pleasure doesn’t necessarily come from the satisfaction of a desire so much as it comes from its pursuit. Writers’ materials are the wiles we conjure with words— and what we choose to omit, or just subtly suggest. As Casanova said, “Love is

three quarters curiosity.” Storytellers must think with the mischievousness mind of a flirt. Never tell all. As Oscar Wilde said, “A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.” Flirting is a silent language, a way of signaling interest and attraction in the space that exists between lover and beloved, writer and reader. The best flirts know how to strike the right balance between sending a signal and then withdrawing, knowing how each gesture changes the story line. A veil exists between writer and reader, so you have to think about how to lift the veil. If you give too much information, you leave your readers no room for imagination. But if you’re appropriately coy, the reader will want more. The goal: to create a pang in the reader. Every paragraph needs to have the quality of a come-hither gaze, teasing out a question that goes unanswered. It’s like playing with a cat with a string. If you dangle a piece of string in front of a cat, it will try to catch the yarn over and over again, even as the string slides through its paws. But when you stop, the cat loses interest and wanders away. Every paragraph you write is like the string you tease the cat with. “The Apocalypse in Stages or Your First Kiss,” by Miranda Williams, is a good example of a story that pulls you along with a string you try to catch. The story is constructed around snippets that function like gapes in a garment, each of the six sections offering a glimpse of the progression of the narrator’s first kiss alongside views of the apocalypse. We read about “dresses the color of chewing gum,” a boy’s “honey coated hair,” “fruit-scented perfume,” and the taste of “summer dew or saliva.” These tiny “chapters” pull the reader forward, functioning like the string being pulled forward, abutting against apocalyptic descriptions of motionless vessels littering the streets, bodies returning to the earth, the end of life. The apocalypse functions as a different kind of gape in the garment, but the two stories live alongside each other, touching each other, existing within each other, kissing each other in their way. The last lines read, “He doesn’t speak to you again, but you keep grasping. Grasping at nothing. Like a child reaching for fairytales.” A world has ended. And begun. One of my favorite images to describe the essence of flash is lipstick traces left on a Kleenex. So suggestive. So colorful. So mysterious. And then the question: Is it a kiss that has happened or the sign of a kiss that is yet to come?

Flashpoint: The Gape of the Garment

“The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke,” wrote Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things. Write a story of attraction that includes just one touch, but not a sexual touch. The story has to reside in the gape of the garment, the oblique, the tantalizing, the unspoken. And then, what kind of touch? How can a single touch be a charged erotic moment? One of the most erotic moments of my youth might have been when my leg brushed against a girl’s leg who I had a crush on during a movie when I was fourteen years old. Or did her leg press against mine? That might be the story I write for this exercise. Brevity is about the tiniest of moments, the fleeting. That is when the garment gapes, when life opens with hope or expectation. After you write your story, ask yourself how thinking of the form of your story as sensuous, as something to feel, changed it? How does it feel to be an author who isn’t dominating or ruling the story but touching and feeling it?

CHAPTER 5

Context

How Much Is Enough?

Taken out of context I must seem so strange.

—ANI DIFRANCO

STRANGELY ENOUGH, MOST OF life comes without much context. Nearly everyone we meet, we meet with minimal surrounding information. We meet them in the small context of a classroom, a bar, a moment in a day, a moment in their life. We imagine a wider context for them, based on sprinkles of data, or we decide a wider context doesn’t really matter. And this is a crucial question for any writer, but especially a writer of brevity: just how much context, or background, if any, is needed? Traditionally, writers are taught to ground their readers in context, to orient them to the story world and strengthen readers’ comprehension. It’s not enough to know that a particular event is occurring—readers also need information to situate the event. So a writer provides the backstory of a character, historical context, details of the physical world of the story, cultural clues, and details of the situation itself. Some of this is overt and obvious to the reader and some of it is more hidden and unconscious, much as we form first impressions of another. According to scientists, a person starts to form impressions of another person after seeing their face for less than one-tenth of a second. In that time, we decide such things as whether or not the person is attractive, trustworthy, competent,

extroverted, or dominant. We approach a story in a similar way. According to Merriam-Webster, the word “context” means “the parts of a discourse that surround a word or passage and can throw light on its meaning.” Context guides us and grounds us. Context is a constellation of elements harmoniously arranged. It takes us by the hand and holds a lens to our eyes, providing a point of view, a premise of clarity. The art nouveau architect Eliel Saarinen gave this advice on context and creation: “Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.” Saarinen’s design principle focused on continuity and connection, but a flash writer might want to tell the story of just the chair in a room. Or perhaps just the chair itself. Or perhaps just one of the chair’s legs. Instead of grounding, a writer might want to disorient—to convey little or even nothing about the story world, to be grasping about for clues in the darkness. To read such pieces, especially miniatures, you have to adjust your gaze, put on a different mental lens. You have to allow for incoherence and distortions and disconnections. You have to give up your expectations of what a story is supposed to be. Dinty W. Moore, writer and founder of Brevity magazine, uses the image of a brush fire deep inside a national park as a metaphor for the context a writer of brevity needs to write with. “The reader is a firefighter, and the writer’s job is to drop that reader directly at the edge of the blaze to encounter the flames and smoke immediately. There is no time for the long hike in.” I sometimes think of such stories, especially short-shorts, living in the word “just.” Just a delay. Just a small annoyance. Just a detour. Just one more drink. Just one more fuck. Just one more minute.

Just one more day. Just one more chance. If you start with the word just, you’re starting a story almost in mid-sentence, without the context of all that happened beforehand, which is how we interact with the world, in the continual present tense. We’re given only scant context in Jacqueline Doyle’s “Little Darling,” a 150word story about a girl who has had sex with an older man, and that context is conveyed mainly through the simple facts of the man’s role in her life and her voice. We don’t get the girl’s or the man’s backstory. We don’t know whether they live in a small town or the city. We don’t know what they talk about. We don’t know why she protects him or why she seems to love him. We don’t even get their names. We are dropped in right at “the edge of the blaze,” and we have to intuit all of the context we’re not given.

Little Darling

It was my idea. Not his. (My theater teacher. My mother’s boyfriend. My soccer coach.) You can have me, I told him. And he put his hand on my cheek, so tender. Meet me, he said. (After school. After your mom leaves for work. After practice.) Don’t tell anyone he said, and put his finger on my lips. Not even your girlfriends. You have to promise. And I promised. And we met. And we. And he. And I. He loved me. (Not his wife. Not my mother. Not that other girl like they said.) He was sweet. He stroked my hair and called me his little darling. You’re a woman now he said to me after. (And it was good. And it was bad. And he said it would get better.) I’m trying to explain it was never his idea. It was mine. He was mine. I’m a woman now.

If Doyle had wanted to, she could have broadened the context and made this into a longer short story or even an entire novel, with layers of context and backstory. But she didn’t need to, did she? And it’s better she didn’t because more context would smother the effects of the innocence of the girl’s voice, the way her

naïvety abets her emotions, the frailty of her rationalization, and the vulnerability of her yearning. We don’t see her with her mother or in scenes with him, but we get plenty of context through the description of them meeting, “After school. After your mom leaves for work. After practice.” We see her keeping this secret from her girlfriends and we see her being proud that she’s now a woman. And we see her now, insisting that it was all her idea, because she is lacking context as well, the context of knowing the world, of knowing that she could be manipulated and used. “And we met. And we. And he. And I.” The context is created by what is left out. But there is a question every writer must ask: When does minimalism become too minimal to provide a readable map? When does understatement edge past clarity toward confusion? “Incoherence is preferable to a distorting order,” Barthes wrote. But what is the right level of “incoherence” in a story? I’ve read the story “Fractures,” by Elizabeth Morton, several times, but I still don’t know specifically what it is about. I’ve wondered if the main character is anorexic, abused, has cancer, or if she’s been in an accident. Perhaps the specifics of her pain aren’t the point, though; perhaps Morton avoids the specifics, avoids providing larger context, so the story can speak to the larger meaning of being fractured. In the story’s splintered narrative—eleven shards that form a collage of her eleven breaks—we see a girl who exists in the space between “the filament and the light.” We read how her breaks “chart a history of sorrow,” but we don’t know what the sorrows are. We read of her grabbing at her flesh and wishing it away. We read of her being sutured together. When the nurse asks her what she wants to be when she grows up, she replies, “Whole; I want to be whole.” And that is what I leave the story with: the tension of being broken and yearning to be whole. For my tastes, I didn’t need to know all of the context that would give a strong foundation to this story, but other readers might get frustrated with such a piece. I sometimes write to intentionally disorient the reader because sometimes the meaning of a story requires an off-kilter mood, a splintered texture, a narrative where the reader is dropped into scenes and has to grapple with a world that doesn’t necessarily answer their questions. Sometimes the rules of the world need to be uneven and unstable—and incomplete. Narrative disorientation is a technique often used when characters enter altered or traumatic states. In my short story “Sleeping and Not Sleeping and Waking,” for example, my main character suffers from insomnia, so I wanted the style of the narrative to reflect

the fractured, surrealistic landscape of his insomniac mind. I drop the character into therapy sessions with a psychologist that seem both realistic and surreal, so the reader doesn’t know if they’re imaginary or not. I include sections of panicky stream-of-consciousness. The pacing of the story moves in a type of restless desperation, a dark night of the soul where the character is at the mercy of his own body and mind, for this is the odd state of insomnia: your mind has betrayed you; it won’t let you sleep. I wanted the nightmarish aspects of insomnia to eclipse the reality of the character’s life so that the reader, like the main character, loses a sense of the difference between waking and sleeping. It’s an existential question for you as writer: the amount and type of context you provide determines the meaning of things. Our point of view, what we know about a situation, frames our observation, consciously and unconsciously. You cannot understand the view without the point of view, in other words. There’s an old saying that if you separate “text” from “context” all that remains is a con. That’s wrong, though. The prefix “con” means “with,” so context is the decision of what to connect a story with, and how much of it.

Flashpoint: Stripping Away Context

Write a story that’s the scene of a breakup. Don’t include hints of place or who the characters are, even what their professions or education levels are. You can write it entirely in dialogue if you want. Afterward, circle any text that shows any context at all. Do you need that context to give the scene meaning? What would the story read like without any context? Is it possible to have no context? Or do you need more context? Does the story require more to keep from disorienting the reader? Do you need context to properly characterize or set the mood of your story? How much context is enough?

CHAPTER 6

The Fullness of Omission

The creative reader silently articulates the unwritten thought that is present in the white space. Let the reader have the experience. Leave judgment in the eye of the beholder.

—JOHN MCPHEE

HOW MUCH OF A story can be left out? Writer Deb Olin Unferth says that the short-short story forces the writer to ask not about what more to add, but what to subtract. “The short makes us consider such questions as: What is the essential element of ‘story’? How much can the author leave out and still create a moving, complete narrative? If I remove all back story, all exposition, all proper nouns, all dialogue—or if I write a story that consists only of dialogue—in what way is it still a story?” Subtraction can be more difficult than addition, which anyone who has tried to declutter a house or clean out a closet Marie Kondo–style knows. The same goes for storytelling. Pruning a story can feel as counterintuitive as pruning a tree. It can seem harmful to cut a branch, to remove what a tree has grown and alter the natural shape it wants to take. But pruning is necessary for the health of a tree. Proper pruning encourages strong growth, increases flower and fruit production, and removes damaged limbs, all of which give aesthetic appeal to a tree. The same goes for pruning the “bush” of a story. Just as a good pruner steps back and walks around a tree or bush, looking for branches that can be removed to open the canopy so that wind can pass through and light can reach the

remaining inner branches, a writer trims words and sentences to allow a story to breathe. Sometimes it’s only a matter of cutting a branch or two. Sometimes it’s cutting away a thicket. In the end, though, the pruning should enhance a tree’s natural shape. The writer Mary Robison, who was often called a minimalist, preferred the label “subtractionist,” because she was, in the end, pruning, not minimizing. “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell,” wrote William Strunk Jr. in The Elements of Style. Pruning, subtracting, is an intimate act. The process of pruning brings a vinedresser closer to the tree. You have to notice the flow of a tree’s shape, its contours, its arches, the way it reaches up to the sky. You have to feel its wood, decide what is healthy or unhealthy. A good pruner inhabits the tree, sensing its spirit, following its energy. The same thing goes for a writer. In looking for what to prune, you become more attuned to a story’s contours. You feel the story in ways you didn’t before. It’s perhaps the most challenging thing for a writer to do, but the ability to remove things so that their removal creates a better story “divides those who can write from those who can really write,” said David Mamet. “Chekhov removed the plot. Pinter, elaborating, removed the history, the narration; Beckett, the characterization. We hear it anyway. Omission is a form of creation” (italics mine). In a miniature story this pruning is a must. A miniature is a drama taken from its larger context but groomed to suggest a bigger world. Flash attunes the writer to the subterranean, the implied, the unsaid, the unseen. The world is always a little bit haunted in a flash story because of what’s left out. As Lu Chi said, “Things move into shadows and they vanish; things return in the shape of an echo.” Echoes reverberate through Kim Magowan’s “The Vibe Tonight.” The story is a single breathless paragraph, just three sentences, about a simple scene of two women (Louisa and the narrator, Grace) drinking wine and talking while waiting for Grace’s husband, Carl, to finish making dinner. Grace is trying to figure out

why the vibe of the night seems tense, and she attributes it to the fact that Louisa has split up with her husband, Matthew. She presents Louisa in a pitying light, as sharing too much, as being bitter about her ex-husband, and, finally, as being unfair to Carl. Louisa and Carl work together at a newspaper, and Carl asks Louisa to back him as sports editor, but she says she thinks it’s time they had a female sports editor. An argument ensues, and Carl ends up calling her a bitch. Then Grace confronts Louisa and asks why she’s being so rude to Carl. Louisa retorts that she’s tired of men bullying her, and then Grace says, “I know splitting up with Matthew has been really hard, but I don’t know why you have to take it out on Carl. We love you,” and Louisa looks at her “like her eyes are lasers, like she hates me and she wants to zap me into a pile of carbonized dust, and she says, ‘Grace, the things I could tell you about your husband …’” We don’t hear about those things, but the statement (and what we imagine she could say) suddenly illuminates character traits that have been dropped earlier— how Carl casts his harshness as honesty, how Grace has given up cooking in deference to Carl because of his critique of her cooking—and we see all of the characters in a new light. Grace doesn’t respond to Louisa, showing just faint recognition of the nature of her relationship to Carl as “some Frozen 2 ballad about being brave and staying true to yourself swells, filling every corner of our house with sound.” We know that she’s neither brave nor true to herself, that she is the one suffering in a bad marriage. We know that Carl, in fact, isn’t a friend of Louisa’s but a chilling man, a bad man. But none of this is told. It’s evoked through hints and tones that speak volumes about what is left out. The story is largely about what’s not on the page. This story is a perfect example of Ernest Hemingway’s theory of omission. “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” Only one-eighth (or, actually, much less) of “The Vibe Tonight” is above water. And, as it shows, the key to writing with omission lies with what remains. The story doesn’t require a density of detail or layers of explanation but illuminating brushstrokes of characterization, a voice that reveals things unsaid, and tiny but telling details that all vividly tell a story that is much bigger than what is on the page.

“To cause a reader to see in her mind’s eye an entire autumnal landscape, for example, a writer needs to deliver only a few words and images—such as corn shocks, pheasants, and an early frost,” said John McPhee. “The creative writer leaves white space between chapters or segments of chapters. The creative reader silently articulates the unwritten thought that is present in the white space.” The white space provides an elliptical texture to a flash story. In fact, if you had to choose a single word to describe the flash aesthetic, the best one might be “ellipsis,” because it speaks to the presence of what is omitted. The word “ellipsis” means “to hide behind silence” or “suspension point.” Ellipsis also means “the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues.” The contextual clues are as important to meaning as the words in a story or conversation, connotations mixing with denotations. The clues of a tone of voice, a facial expression, a gesture, a mood. The ineffable influences the effable in dramatic ways. When something is omitted or unspoken, the imagination has to work to fill in the gaps. Depending on its context and placement in a sentence, an ellipsis can indicate an unfinished thought, a leading statement, a slight pause, an echoing voice, or a nervous or awkward silence. An ellipsis is a type of sensual touch between writer and reader, a moment of anticipation, a frisson of connection. In her book on the ellipsis, Ellipsis in English Literature: Signs of Omission, Anne Toner demonstrates how writers have striven to get closer to the hesitancies and interruptions of spoken language, the indeterminacies of thought, and the successive or fragmented nature of experience by means of ellipsis. Initially used mostly in drama, ellipses marked places of self-interruption when characters paused and hesitated. They had to use “gestures and expressions in the place of words, precipitating the actor or reader to fill a gap.” Interestingly, the first known ellipsis, which appeared in print in 1588 in Andria, might have been included not by the author but by the printer, Thomas East, who had a reputation as a printer of music. In those times, a printer was more of a collaborator with the author, and East might have introduced the ellipsis because of his sensitivity to rests and pauses in music, to the need for omission as a part of a story. The ellipsis has always been a questionable punctuation mark, a rogue mark of

sorts. It wasn’t included in grammar books until well into the eighteenth century because grammar was meant to teach well-executed syntax, and “the unfinished was felt to be at odds with grammatical thinking,” writes Toner. And yet “the unfinished” is such a significant part of life. The unfinished requires its own grammar—and is in itself a storytelling technique. As Stuart Dybek said, a flash story moves with “a quality of simple but profound suggestiveness.” The most haunting stories are those that don’t provide answers but open up questions. Telling a good short-short story is similar to playing the Ouija board. You discover a small part of the story and let your imagination speak with the other side, invisible as it might be, to know the rest of it. The power of suggestiveness and how omission helps create it was crucial for me to learn in my early attempts at one-hundred-word stories. A good onehundred-word piece works with omission, moving with a precise balance of what’s left out versus what’s included. They’re tiny yet deeply interior moments that reside in spectral spaces. As I learned how to write them, I learned how to “mind the gaps,” as I like to put it—the gaps between words, sentences, and paragraphs, the gaps around a story itself. I practiced the art of omission, and in those spaces I discovered the wisps and whispers that are integral to good storytelling. The most haunting stories are those that don’t provide answers but open up questions. “The jewel of the sudden story is the gap. A lot of words are missing, not because they are extraneous, but because their absence speaks the unspeakable,” said Lori Ann Stephens. The nature of a story is defined by its gaps—or through erasure itself, which is its own type of vessel. An erasure poem or story is one where the writer takes a source document—anything from a page from Beowulf to an article in the newspaper—and proceeds to erase portions of the text, whether by using a black Sharpie, Wite-Out, or tape. Erasure decenters the text, and with a majority of the text gone, the story is now told through a constellation of bits, a new story scattered or emerging from the page of its former life. For example, in Jen Bervin’s Nets—a title that emerges from the second syllable of the word “sonnets”—Bervin literally nets words and phrases from sixty of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The book is made up of a faded undertext of the Shakespearean sonnets with Bervin’s “netted” words and phrases standing out in

bold ink. When you read the poems, you’re reading several things at once: the “new” poem, the old sonnet, and then the gap in between—all of the history of the sonnet, the history of the world, in fact; postmodernism connecting with Elizabethan literature. In a note to Nets, Bervin writes that she “stripped” the sonnets “to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible—a divergent elsewhere. When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page.” Erasure creates a dramatic tension between what is and what was, speaking to a subtext that lives beneath the surface of our lives, or speaking to acts of covering up, burying, and censoring. In fact, erasure stories or poems often have the look of a redacted document from the FBI, with black splotches littering the page. There’s the question of who removed the text and why. There’s a story, a conflict, a tension between the nature of the text being erased and the power relation of the person doing the erasing. Erasure is a tool of commentary and decoding just as it is a tool of recreating and expressing. “Erasure poetry creates a new work whose meaning does not stand alone but is informed by its process, by the shadow of the old document and the act of obfuscation that transforms it,” writes Jennifer S. Cheng. Erasure tangibly lets us know that a text can’t give us the whole story, that there are secrets to uncover, stories to unearth, or words to stitch together in different ways. The poetic can become political in erasure because of the way erasure disrupts the original and essentially translates it into a new work by the way the removal of language defaces or shows disremembering. In fact, as Solmaz Sharif points out, erasure is how governments, colonizers, and “those who write history erase the marginalized, the Other, and their stories.” “Historically, the striking out of text is the root of obliterating peoples,” writes Sharif. To show the political poetics of erasure, Cheng analyzes Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, a book with 224 pages of experiments with erasure based on a two-page legal report, Gregson v. Gilbert, that details the murderous drowning of 150 Africans so that the captain of a slave ship could collect insurance. She cites an interview with Philip, who says, “The very fact of physically mutilating the text

broke the spell that the completed text has on us. I use the word ‘mutilate’ with great deliberation here since I was deeply aware at the time I worked on Zong! that the intent of the transatlantic slave trade was to mutilate—languages, cultures, people, communities and histories—in the effort of a great capitalist enterprise. And I would argue that erasure is intrinsic to colonial and imperial projects. It’s an erasure that continues up to the present.” Cheng says that in Zong!, “visually, words, phrases, fragments of sounds and silences are scattered across the pages like bones. Everywhere are ghosts and evidence of what cannot be recovered.” The mutilation of the words also allows them to rearrange “into spore words,” creating a new language, a new history that the reader has created with the text and the gaps in the text, filling in the history. “What is at stake is an ‘originary erasure’ that can’t be recovered; instead, the ‘originary erasure permeates … and echoes.’ We can never know our lost voices firsthand or in completion, but we can be haunted.” The exploration of negative spaces for the art they hold has been a notable artistic technique, especially in the last hundred years. Robert Rauschenberg wanted to see if an artwork could be produced entirely through erasure. He first tried erasing his own drawings but ultimately decided that in order for the experiment to succeed he had to begin with an artwork that was undeniably significant in its own right. He approached Willem de Kooning, an artist for whom he had tremendous respect, and asked him for a drawing to erase. Somewhat reluctantly, de Kooning agreed. After Rauschenberg completely erased de Kooning’s drawing, he and fellow artist Jasper Johns labeled, matted, and framed the work in a simple, gilded frame, and Johns inscribed the following words below the obliterated de Kooning drawing: ERASED de KOONING DRAWING ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG 1953. It’s interesting that Rauschenberg signed his name as the artist. By signing his name, he asserted that he created the story by taking the story away, so the byline is his. The frame and the inscription are integral parts of the finished artwork, offering the sole indication of the act central to its creation. Without the inscription, we would have no idea what is in the frame. The piece would be indecipherable, but the frame—the statement that what is in it is a story, or was a story—is the necessary element of presentation. Rauschenberg asked the question of how we live in what’s left behind. How do we live in what’s been taken away? How do we live in what we can no longer

see or touch? Why do we erase what do we do? The power of Erased de Kooning Drawing derives from the allure of the unseen and from the enigmatic nature of Rauschenberg’s decision to erase a de Kooning. Was it an act of homage, provocation, humor, patricide, destruction, or, as Rauschenberg once suggested, celebration? Erased de Kooning Drawing eludes easy answers, but it shows how a story can be created when the story is taken away. “A canvas is never empty,” as John Cage said. Cage’s famous composition 4’33”, which became known by the duration of four minutes and 33 seconds in which a pianist sits at a piano but doesn’t play, was influenced by Cage’s encounter with the “white paintings” by Rauschenberg—huge canvasses of undifferentiated white whose surfaces vary with particles of dust and light reflections. He learned about the fullness emptiness holds. He also learned the art of omission because he erased the musical performance that attendees expected and gave them its absence, which was a presence, of course, full of the sounds of the people and the place, breaths, shufflings, coughs, and sighs that presented a different way of listening. “Silence has greatness simply because it is. It is, and that is its greatness, its pure greatness,” said Cage.

Flashpoint: Building a Story through Omission

Our initial impulse as writers is to want to give context. To tell where we are, how we got here, what we’re feeling. Writing context is easy. The hard part is not to tell things. And to tell things by not telling them. This is a skill that takes a lot of practice. How can you provide just enough clarity and just enough ambiguity? Ambiguity is an essential aspect of the human experience, after all, and omission is the key craft technique to nurture it. Here are three exercises that rely on a different type of omission:

Write a story that consists of only a list (see “Orange” by Neil Gaiman, “To Do” by Jennifer Egan, or “Charley’s Idea” by Richard Brautigan).

Write an “erasure poem.” Take a piece of text, any text, and cross out words or cover them up with a Sharpie, paint, fingernail polish, or charcoal. Write a story only through dialogue, using Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” as an example.

Then ask yourself: Did your story gain through subtraction? If so, what did it gain?

CHAPTER 7

White Spaces

The realized one-page fiction must move palpably beyond the page, like a ghost self…. The one-page fiction should hang in the air of the mind like an image made of smoke.

—JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS

IMAGINE THE MOMENT A bell is rung, how its sound dissipates into the air, how it’s defined by silence as it becomes silence. The white space in a story functions like that air surrounding a sound. It allows a piece of art to breathe. In a narrative that’s constructed with fragments, white space becomes a significant part of the story’s architecture, its texture, its semiotics. “A painter is a choreographer of space,” said Barnett Newman. So is a writer. The world is laid out in space. Our relationships move through space. Our words hang in space. The white space serves as a frame of a story, like the border that sets off a photograph, the silence that surrounds notes of music, or the stillness that defines the musculature of a sculpture. Every story begins and ends with white space. Designers of publications refer to the white spaces of the page as “functional white.” White space operates as a different type of punctuation, with its own rules of grammar. White space guides the reader through a text, establishing a rhythm, a mood, a pace. A good designer makes the negative space an essential part of the design itself. All sorts of things can happen in these white spaces that connect yet disconnect.

A few minutes or a few years might pass on a page. The white space might function the way a scene dissolves into another in film, or it might be the transition to a flashback. No matter its purpose, it’s an invitation to the reader to ponder and imagine. “Super-short paragraphs and line breaks can aerate prose, throwing light into density, giving the reader space to think. They also create dynamism, letting the eye swing to the left more often, each swing shifting the thought,” writes Jane Alison. Each chunk of text on a page is called a crot, which is a version of the stanza for a prose writer. In poetry, poets frame images and ideas with line and stanza breaks and with spacing between words to create the poem not just on the linear level of reading each word but in visual, auditory, and conceptual layers. By setting off some elements with space, each textual element interacts in a similar way that brushstrokes of color in a painting do, in an interplay of juxtaposition that makes new meaning. The white space itself becomes part of the narrative. The pauses shape sound and language to create a poetic field, helping a reader to be more receptive to the resonances from words and images, to heighten their meaning. White space can be the pattern or the disruption of pattern. Each space connotes a change, a break, a liminal moment. Jane Hirshfield writes in her book Nine Gates that each space in the parts of a poem represents “the enduring transformation of the threshold,” and the same thing happens in a story. The reader is held in suspension, in between the “before” and the “after,” connected yet hanging in abeyance, expectant. The space implies the possibility of something lurking or of something passing. It contains at the same time that it liberates. Hirshfield’s metaphor of white space as a threshold holds true in all of its meanings: it’s a doorway, a point of takeoff, and a limit. Hirshfield describes “poetry’s fertility” as the “marriage of said and unsaid, of languaged self and unlanguaged other, of the known world and the gravitational pull of what lies beyond knowing.” The threshold that white space provides is fundamentally a paradox: we enter and leave with the same step. The writer who builds a story through fragments knits narrative into the spaces between sentences, moving the story through hints, through the sonic qualities of

poetry, so the reader is always working to fill in the gaps, to speak the silences. The thresholds of white spaces in a work build emotion, ask questions, and speak their own sort of dialogue. White space makes the unsaid present. The unsaid is part of the story, but also the question of the unsaid: Why have words disappeared? Why is there silence? White space is an invitation to listen in new ways, to see if you can hear what is missing. The white space seems to have its own power, as if the pieces of a story are never quite the same, as if blocks of text are being rearranged, transient. The surface includes ruptures and shifts, highlighting the recesses, the cracks, showing the world in a sliver, not a whole. There is no longer coherence, not of a story, not of a sense of being. An absence is literally carved into the story, and the peripheries take on a bigger role. There is always something blurry in your peripheral vision. The white space invites you to notice the blur. Meaning becomes more delicate because it’s loosely connected. It’s floating, unanchored, amorphous, inarticulable. The reader is in a state of unease because the form doesn’t promise a trajectory of fulfillment or arrival. No, instead it promises detours, digressions, perhaps lostness itself. Borders aren’t coherent and delineated but shifting, fluid. Truths have to be accessed in different ways. Here is what we know: We belong and also we do not belong. We are part of something, yet adrift, separate. But white space tells us that there are other ways of knowing. Text and logic have their limits. Feeling and intuition are relevant, too. I love residue. I love objects that are decaying. I like how a new force emerges from them, a new poetry. White space allows for the residues of a story to find a place. The disembodied finds a body. What was irrelevant becomes relevant. White space recognizes the way life dissolves and evaporates. Our monuments of text, whatever we build, are transient, mere sketches. The use of white space, often thought to be a superficial aesthetic decision, is really an existential decision. Aesthetics reflect the nature of the soul and the way that soul exists in the world. An aesthetic provides entrée. So the writer has to ask, “What is the tension of this space? What shadows does it contain?” Whereas a traditional story tends to move through its connections in mostly one direction—“A + B = C”—writing in an aesthetic of brevity allows a story to move through its disconnections, its abrasions, its interstices. The white

space speaks not to logic, but to mystery, to the ineffable, to the pivots in life that often lack words. The space allows shades of meaning to emerge that we might not consider. Life is lived through juxtapositions and spaces as much as it’s lived through connections, so the grammar of white spaces allows a story to achieve a type of mimesis unavailable to conventional narrative. In Jenny Boully’s The Body: An Essay, for example, Boully leaves the entire text of the book blank, except for footnotes, which are clues to what the book contained. The footnotes make the reading experience disjointed, obviously, forcing the reader to essentially look into the “body” of the text as through a keyhole. It’s a small work that becomes large, each footnote opening up into the expanse of the blank spaces with the bigness of a life. The book implies that the body of any text is largely a story projected by the reader. We’re picking up little clues and piecing them together in our own way. The body of the text is missing, or, rather, the body is in our minds. It’s an exercise and a commentary on evocation. Life and writing are about signaling, in the end. Nudity is a form of dress just as white space is a form of text. Maggie Nelson uses white space in Bluets to capture the way personal loss can shatter us through 240 lyrical prose musings, or “propositions” as she calls them. Each proposition is either a sentence or a short paragraph, none longer than two hundred words, and none of them arranged chronologically or thematically but instead according to a poetic logic of their own. Nelson says she shuffled them around “countless times,” weaving them into streams of feelings, of experience, rather than into a road going in a definitive direction. The critic Thomas Larson refers to the structure of Bluets as a “nomadic mosaic”: “Its structure is built by pulling away from the core and by keeping attached to the core. The goal (if there is one) is nomadic, a sort of nomadic mosaic. As one reads, the book, despite its progression, loses its linearity and feels circular, porous, a tad unstable.” Spaces encourage nomadism. How does one become centered in the Sahara? Each oasis is like a snippet of text. Each journey through space includes mirages. Nelson needs the particular drama and energy that only unconnected sentences can provide. The space, with the propositions adrift in it, is a vital element of her storytelling. White space is even more important and pronounced in microfiction. With shorter forms, sometimes 99 percent of the story is underwater (to go back to

Hemingway’s “iceberg principle” that everything but the tip of a story should be underwater), unseen to the reader. Or rather, it is in the white spaces. You have to write with gaps as much as you write with words because it is in that space between the meaning of the words on the page and the ways the reader is making meaning of them where the threshold of transformation and imagination takes place. In writing of any length, the white space is the frame of the story opening up to include the reader, you might say.

Flashpoint: Passageways and Thresholds

Take an existing story and add breaks of white spaces (or breaths/thresholds of white space). Do it just to play with space and see how aerating the story affects its textures. Per the examples of stories by Boully and Nelson above, it’s best to use white space in ways that are intrinsic to the meaning of the story, so this exercise might seem forced and awkward. The main thing is to play with being a poet with your prose and to give yourself permission to think of white space as an additional storytelling tool. It takes practice to use it well, so even if you do this exercise with a story that relies on connective tissue, it will give you a sense of how a story’s contours change with breaks and space.

CHAPTER 8

Plotting in Miniature (and with a Slant)

Instead of concerning itself only with what happens next, flash fiction is capable of pushing outwards in every direction. It poses questions and feels free of the burden to provide answers for everything. As in real life, not all things can be easily solved, not everything is a happy ending.

—JOYCE CHONG

ONE OF THE MOST frequent questions I’m asked about one-hundred-word stories is whether a one-hundred-word piece can have a plot since it has so few words. E. M. Forster famously wrote, “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.” By that definition, one hundred words is ample space for a full plot. Although flash welcomes and nurtures a poetic sensibility, the emphasis of most short-shorts is still on storytelling. Most flash stories, even one-hundred-word pieces, have an identifiable beginning, middle, and end, and they tend to form themselves around conflict and character change—the typical ingredients of a plot. Plot might just be less pronounced in flash fiction because the story is spawned by a situation, a moment that might be quite ordinary, not by the grand arc of a lavish story line. I’ve always liked Irving Howe’s definition of flash stories: “One might say that these short-shorts constitute epiphanies (climactic moments of high grace or realization) that have been torn out of their contexts.” That statement reminds me of the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s concept of the “decisive moment”—the split second a photographer has to anticipate in order to take a

photo that will reveal the larger truth of a situation. This is not to say nothing happens in flash fiction, just that action tends to move through small pivots more than major events, yet those pivots can serve in their own way as a series of acts. For example, in my one-hundred-word story “Castings,” a somewhat plotless story, a middle-aged husband is dissatisfied with the “tattered underwear” that now symbolizes his marriage (initial conflict). To reclaim its romance, he asks his wife to get high with him and lay in the grass (character desire). But she insists, “with a survivalist’s determination,” on going to the grocery store (obstacle). He lays on the grass alone, pondering the worms beneath him shedding their skins, their castings, with only the clouds as companions (the resolution/denouement). Her practicality is in conflict with his need for intimate waywardness, which is the inflection point of the catalyst for its drama. Here’s the entire story:

Castings

A resistance to spontaneous modes of imagination. A disdain for sultriness. Tattered underwear. Every marriage has its own legalities, and these were Anthony’s claims for divorce. Sometime, long ago, they’d believed in something that rhymed with galactic. Now, if gossip columns about ordinary people existed, they would have reported him howling at the moon. In one last attempt to save their romance, he asked her to get high and lay on the grass. She held a grocery list, stared at him with a survivalist’s determination. He saw teddy bears, grasshoppers in the clouds. The worms beneath him abandoned their selves.

I should note that I didn’t write “Castings” with a plot trajectory in mind. I rarely think of any plot formula when writing. As a somewhat inadequate plotter—or perhaps just an uneasy plotter—I’ve stopped thinking of the conventional notions of plot because I find them too onerous, and sometimes unhelpful, especially the mathematical and dogmatic convention of Freytag’s Pyramid, with its seven steps of storytelling: exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, and denouement. Plot, and the conventional definitions

of it, is in some ways the most tyrannical of all craft elements. There is a hammering of Freytag’s pyramid that goes on in many creative-writing classrooms and craft books. The pyramid kidnaps young writers each year. But stories don’t have to shape themselves in such a way. In fact, if you’re not writing a story that has a three-act structure, then you’ve opened the door to a much larger world. The writer Megan Giddings questions Freytag’s pyramid because of the way it forces writers into using time in a way that can “inhibit a writer from thinking deeply about the expansions and contractions that lead to richer plots, big characters, or capturing an essence of living.” She says that such a stringent requirement of making sure the tension is consistently rising “means that quieter moments, humorous moments, moments where time slows and allows room for thought, might feel like they need to be cut.” Freytag’s pyramid promises resolution, understanding, completeness, whereas a different shape of plot provides “less of an expectation for answers, more room to think about the complexity of being a person,” says Giddings. Megan Pillow Davis’s story, “Margo Turn Left,” is a story about a moment when “time slows” and a character, Margo, is paralyzed by “the complexity of being a person.” The story is an incantation chanted by her friends who want her to escape from a bad marriage. Margo has gotten in the car to leave, as she has in the past, and she’s stopped at the end of the road. If she turns left, she turns away from her life, toward freedom. The women, who we experience as a collective narrative voice, listen to the clink of her wedding ring against the window, watching with thoughts yearning to reach her to tell her to turn left and leave. “Here is Margo, at the stop sign still, and we all know that summer is leaving us. We all know her bag is packed, sitting on the passenger seat like a pledge. We all know that if she goes, the leaves will fall like a curtain and the sun will shutter and the bells that ring on every porch when she walks past will die. And yet here is Margo, not gone yet. Now is the time for the incantation.” The incantation is “Turn left, Margo.” It’s repeated throughout the story as we learn of the many gifts Margo has given through her generous spirit. The women urge her to turn left in their silent chant “because if you do, the road will spin out beneath you and the sky will get its color back and you will find a home where the birds don’t remind you of death.”

But the story ends in suspension. The chants, though sung by many, leave Margo alone at the crossroads, in between two worlds once again. There is no resolution. There are no clear answers. The linear narrative promises arrival, cohesion, a world you can trust, should trust, whereas the nonlinear allows for the inchoate and the oblique to play a larger role. The nonlinear allows for the search for different shapes, for an aesthetics of dimensionality. When I think of flash, I think of words like “rupture,” “splinter,” “suspend,” “interrupt,” “dissolve,” “mix,” “scatter,” “swirl,” and “compress”—and, in fact, the title of my collection of one-hundredword stories is Fissures. These aren’t words of solidity. They represent a world that isn’t holding. Imagine a plot formed around one or all of those words—the shape of the narrative trajectory changes dramatically, allowing a new kind of narrative geometry to emerge. The reader has to be alert. No one is taking them by the hand. A story is being framed and reframed continually. It’s a process not of familiarization but of defamiliarization, of decenteredness. So the reader is on edge, vulnerable, perhaps alienated, seeking wholeness, questioning—active, always active. Like Megan Giddings, instead of trying to force my stories into a geometrically determined plot, I like writing about situations that provide “less of an expectation for answers” and “more room to think about the complexity of being a person.” I like exploring the small, telling pivots of a moment because I believe that such small moments can be as important as the larger dramatic moments we often think define life. Such small moments often don’t fit in longer works, though, or they can’t be given the proper weight, because of the larger story surrounding them. “Character change” is sometimes even too big of a way to put it. Take the story “Hourly” by Scott Garson, in which he captures the stagnation of a menial job and the frustration of unexpressed creativity in a single moment—a single gesture. In its entirety it reads:

They gave me a job at Halloween Town. Strip mall with vacancies. Sad. I was a wizard, vaguely swinging my wand. “Everything change,” I commanded.

I often think of small stories like this as “tropisms,” to introduce another metaphor to describe flash stories with. I was introduced to the notion of tropisms as a young writer by Nathalie Sarraute, who said that a tropism was a biological term used to describe the almost imperceptible movements that living organisms make toward or away from whatever impinges on them. Her brief stories trace the contours of nuance, attempting to capture the “interior movements that precede and prepare our words and actions, at the limits of our consciousness.” Traditional narrative forms that focus on character change and plot overlook the true ways our senses perceive the world, Sarraute said. In her book Tropisms, she aimed to “take hold of the instant, by enlarging it, developing it,” by dramatizing small interior movements. There are few if any “events” in her fiction, beyond the domestic and the familial. Traditional markers of character, the presentation of personality, disintegrate. She delves into the unspoken. She exposes politeness for its veils of aggression, the ways it can create anxiety in others. “There is a plot, if you like, but it’s not the usual plot. It is the plot made up of these movements between human beings,” she said. Sarraute encourages a keener attention to life. She shows how there is much to miss if we don’t look at the world through a microscope to explore unnoticed crevices, to peek inside the fissures that form our days. When the writer Lidia Yuknavitch discovered Sarraute, she said she was freed from the conventional model of a rising arc of plot and started writing her stories as a “series of intensities.” “Intensities” is a good way to visualize Sarraute’s tropisms. I’ve always been interested in the disconnections that exist between people, especially in intimate situations. So much of life’s drama happens in the way we hear or don’t hear others, how we’re so focused on speaking our needs, as if we’re still children. We are still children, of course. Almost everything we say is “I want that / I need this,” in some form. I was drawn to short-shorts because their condensation tends to magnify these disconnections, these “intensities.” The existential grist of the distances between us all comes to the foreground with more piquancy because of the brevity of the form. So the short form is an invitation to question the definition of plot. Another

dominant plot model that has come to be accepted as gospel is Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which Campbell posits that there is a common mythological structure of storytelling that crosses cultures and time periods, which he calls “the hero’s adventure.” In the introduction to The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell summarizes the monomyth: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Campbell’s theory, a sibling of Freytag’s Pyramid (or Campbell might say its father), has permeated writing workshops and authors’ psyches, yet we should ask if this plot structure actually reflects life in the way we experience it and if it’s the best structure to use for our stories. Do we live lives that mirror an adventure quest? If we live lives that “rupture,” “splinter,” “suspend,” “interrupt,” “dissolve,” “mix,” “scatter,” “swirl,” and “compress,” how can we be expected to render them in a form that speaks to wholeness and cohesion? In fact, why aspire to unity in a work? Instead of reading for the escalating action embedded in Campbell’s structure, what if we read a piece just for its tone, its lyricism, its mood, its intensities? Can such elements supersede plot? Brevity allows for other types of plots, other types of reading experiences. “Character is plot” is an old craft adage because each action, each quest to attain a desire that escalates tension and suspense moves the story forward, so we live with a character’s choices and the consequences of those choices. Agency and action, choice and consequence, therefore reside in the heartbeat of plot. But all stories are about ways of being in the world, and this is just one view into life, so we have to ask how closely it resembles our view of ourselves. Campbell’s structure privileges the outwardness of an adventure story over a more interior and static story. We’ve oriented our narratives toward an actionoriented plot that eclipses the story of those who stay at home. In The Odyssey, the focus is on Odysseus, essentially leaving out the story of Penelope, his wife who remains at home, which I’d argue is an equally interesting story. Instead of facing battles and the high seas, Penelope has to reside in the existential angst of waiting in a pensive drama of hope and doubt. She waits twenty years for Odysseus’s final return, and in that time she has to devise various strategies to delay marrying 108 suitors. Perhaps that isn’t a plot with a “thousand faces,” but that’s a story I want to read.

Matthew Salesses, in his book Craft in the Real World, emphasizes how the source of such a narrative theory has cultural roots. Western storytelling developed from a tradition of oral performances meant to recount heroic deeds. The Chinese literary historian Zheng Zhenduo says, however, that Chinese narrative comes from a tradition of gossip and street talk—so it is less about adventure and more about day-to-day life. The literary scholar Ming Dong Gu says that Chinese fiction grew with an emphasis on lyricism and relies on pattern, repetition, and rhythm. It is “organized on a structural principle different from the time-based, direction-oriented, and logically coherent principle of the Western narrative.” Plot is a statement about reality, a commentary on how life is lived. I wonder how the “plotless” is full of a different kind of plot, one that is more nuanced and subtle. “The shorter the piece of fiction, the less need for a plot,” said Jerome Stern. “You can write a fine story in which little happens: A man curses his neighbor, a widow quits her mahjongg group, or an unhappy family goes on a picnic. Simple shapes work better than something fussy and complicated.” Perhaps such a story isn’t without plot so much as it is full of a kind of plot that requires a deeper kind of noticing from the reader. Some short-shorts certainly have a less discernable beginning, middle, and end. They eddy, as if they’re leaves floating along the slow meandering of a creek. A tiny tale can be like a loop, looping through other loops, creating a quilt, a mosaic. They tend not to propel you forward, as in seeking what’s next, but to hold the world in place for one dramatic moment. I’ve heard people say that flash has no room or time to linger, that it’s all about that bright moment of illumination, a dramatic act, but I question that. Perhaps a short-short can linger the way we linger on a street corner, not realizing the light has changed. Perhaps a story can be as much about a mood as it is about an action. The moment can matter as much as a series of moments. A lyric impression, a series of lyric impressions can move with escalating tensions. Why not? Could it be enough for a work to simply be expectant with meaning? This isn’t to say that short-shorts don’t need momentum. Every work, whether it’s a six-word story or an experimental novel or even an antinovel, needs momentum of some sort. But it’s up to the author to decide what the elements of momentum are. Does momentum arise from direct action (a character desires something, encounters an obstacle, acts), or does it arise from the “subtle,

progressive buildup of thematic resonances,” as David Shields puts it. One can create momentum through an image, a mood, a voice. It’s harder to pull off, but the reward is often more satisfying and more meaningful. “A short story, in its brevity, may not have a fully developed plot, but it must have the essence of a plot, yearning,” said Robert Olen Butler. Yes, yearning. Not a series of plot points that map to a structure, but a yearning, a restlessness, that takes a story from one moment to another with uncertainty lacing itself through the prose. To yearn in a state of uncertainty means writing toward the mystery, toward the questions. Even though we seek answers, we also know that the answer often isn’t the answer. Or that sometimes an answer is insufficient. If a writer is pursuing a mystery, that’s a type of plot unto itself. We can feel that anticipation, the suspense that naturally resides between the known and the unknown, the opening up of questions. “If mystery, the genre, is about finding the answers, then mystery, that elusive yet essential element of fiction, is about finding the questions,” said Maud Casey. All stories must possess mystery. They either offer a frame in which the reader tries to solve the mystery, to know what happened, or they are mystery itself, each sentence, each scene, built around questions that go unanswered. Brevity is built with questions, forms itself around questions, nurtures questions, finds its breath in questions. It’s not a style that seeks to speak with certainty, but with nuance. Italo Calvino (quoting Giacomo Leopardi) claimed that language becomes more poetic as it becomes vaguer and more imprecise. In fact, Calvino noted that in Italian, “the word for ‘vague’ (vago) also means charming, attractive; having originally meant ‘wandering,’ it still carries with it a feeling of movement and mutability, which in Italian suggests not only uncertainty and indeterminacy but also grace and pleasure.” Sometimes a story can be about mystery itself and nothing more. Brevity naturally provides an opening to mystery because the mysterious eludes all words of explanation. It speaks to something more significant than what can be explained. There is always something beyond. “Mystery in fiction means taking the reader to that land of Un—uncertainty, unfathomability, unknowing. It’s Kafka’s axe to the frozen seas of our soul. In

other words, it will—and it should—mess you up,” said Casey. A plot-driven narrative seeks resolution and conclusion whereas works of brevity often seek irresolution. These are stories that hang in the air, unfinished. Jane Alison describes such a narrative as a narrative of wavelets: “Dispersed patterning, a sense of ripples or oscillation, little ups and downs, might be more true to human experience than a single crashing wave: I’m more likely to feel some tension, a small discovery, a tiny change, a relapse.” Instead of dramatic action, can’t the mood of a story—its “dispersed patterning”—be just as important? Can’t such things be their own sort of plot? As Robert Scholes said, “Quality of mind, not plot, is the soul of narrative.”

Flashpoint: A Story in Seven Sentences

Do you remember the story you wrote with seven fragments in chapter 3? Revisit those seven sentences, but now, instead of viewing them as seven separate fragments, write a cohesive story in seven sentences with each sentence focusing on one of Freytag’s principles of storytelling: exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, and denouement. How does the story change when written within this narrative grid? Is it improved by having a clearer narrative trajectory? Does it lose any of the mystery or odd charm it might have had when told in a more disconnected manner? How do its contours change?

CHAPTER 9

Writing Characters in Fleeting Profile

I love the idea that every character you ever write has a secret they’re whispering to you. Sometimes those secrets are revealed to the reader.

—SHERRIE FLICK

CHARACTERIZATION PRESENTS A CHALLENGE in flash, especially if you’re the sort of writer who likes to delve into a character’s background, assemble lists of character traits, and put your character through personality tests. E. M. Forester laid out the conventional ground rules for such characterization in his famous book, Aspects of the Novel. “Round characters” are fully dimensional, nuanced, and capable of surprise, he said, whereas “flat characters” are two-dimensional and relatively uncomplicated. “Round characters” are deemed necessary in a novel, in particular, because the reader wants to have the full sense of a character, to know their inner and outer lives. Our general reverence for psychological realism in fiction places a heavy burden on characterization. A writer tends to be expected to give a maximum amount of information about a character—showing how the character walks and talks and how the past contains the motives for all present-day behavior. Because of the condensed space of flash fiction, though, the idea of a fully rounded character is not viable. A detailed backstory is anathema to flash because you’ll be tempted to stuff all of the more you’ve conjured into the story. In flash fiction, we see characters only in “fleeting profile,” according to Irving Howe. We likely won’t know where they were born, if they went to college, or whatever neurosis they might have developed due to a childhood trauma because

we know them only in the seizure of a moment, not in a dramatically arching plot line. We hear a line of their flute solo but not the orchestra they play in. And yet the snippet of that flute solo has to fill the spaces of a concert hall. Take Etgar Keret’s “The Story about a Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God,” where the bus driver in the story isn’t even given a name. We know one essential thing about him: he didn’t open the door for anyone who was late, not because he was mean, but because of his math-based ideology, which said that making someone wait fifteen minutes for the next bus was more fair than making all of the people on the bus wait an extra thirty seconds because of that one person. “When it came to choosing between smiles and thanks on the one hand, and the good of society on the other, this driver knew what it had to be.” This ideology is tested one day by Eddie, who we only know a few things about: he’s an assistant cook at a restaurant who apologizes to customers himself when the food he makes doesn’t turn out right; during one apology he meets a woman named Happiness, who pledges to meet him at a place called the Dolphinarium; and he has a sickness that “always made him oversleep by ten minutes, and no alarm clock did any good.” Of course, Eddie oversleeps, misses the bus, then happens to run and catch it when a light turns red just before the bus gets there. As he knocks on the door, gasping, the bus driver looks at him and is reminded that before he became a bus driver, he had wanted to be God. “And suddenly the driver remembered how he’d once promised himself that if he became God in the end, he’d be merciful and kind, and would listen to all His creatures. So when he saw Eddie from way up in his driver’s seat, kneeling on the asphalt, he simply couldn’t go through with it, and in spite of all his ideology and his simple arithmetic, he opened the door, and Eddie got on—and didn’t even say thank you, he was so out of breath.” You might think the story has a happy ending, but you might be wrong, so I’ll let you read it. The point, though, is that a character, an imaginary being, doesn’t have to necessarily be a simulation of a person in real life. Milan Kundera says a character need only to fill “the whole space of the situation.” Instead of thinking about characterization through a lot of window dressing, we need to only think about getting to the bottom of a character’s existential crux, in other words. In her essay “Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tale,” Kate Bernheimer talks

about the function of “flatness” in the traditional fairy tale. “Fairy-tale characters are silhouettes, mentioned simply because they are there. They are not given many emotions—perhaps one, such as happy or sad—and they are not in psychological conflict.” Fairy-tale characters break Forster’s rule of round characters, but this flatness is desirable, Bernheimer says, because it “allows depth of response in the reader.” She uses the fairy tale “The Rosebud” as an example.

There was once a poor woman who had two little girls. The youngest was sent to the forest every day to gather wood. Once when she had gone a long way before finding any, a beautiful little child appeared who helped her to pick up the wood and carried it home for her. Then in a twinkling he vanished. The little girl told her mother, but the mother wouldn’t believe her. Then one day she brought home a rosebud and told her mother the beautiful child had given it to her and said he would come again when the rosebud opened. The mother put the rosebud in water. One morning the little girl didn’t get up out of bed. The mother went and found the child dead, but looking very lovely. The rosebud had opened that same morning.

Bernheimer points out that descriptions like “beautiful” and “lovely” are used, but they aren’t explained—and most notably, they aren’t shown, violating one of the golden rules of writing, “Show, don’t tell.” We know little about the characters, but the story still evokes a strange and poignant sadness. Carmen Maria Machado notes how flash fiction borrows from this style of characterization. “It is, by definition, short; it leaves things out, it relies on inference. It doesn’t necessarily have psychological flatness, per se—though it can look like that, sometimes, depending on the story—but possesses missing details (the right missing details) and flatness (the right kind of flatness) that creates a vacuum that begs to be filled.” Cathy Ulrich uses flatness to create fullness in her story “Being the Murdered Actress.” When a famous actress is murdered, we see her portrayed in the media with parted lips and half-closed eyes—as if anticipating the role of the murdered

actress in her real life. The story proceeds to blur the lines of who she was as her life becomes a commercial entertainment hook. “They’ll write a biopic about you. A man will. A man who knew you, tangentially, when you were still alive. A man who remembers, tangentially, the sound of your laughter, the tap of your footstep. He’ll write you the way he remembers you, the way the people do. He’ll write you larger than life.” Starlets line up for auditions. They all research the murdered actress’s life (but none of that research is revealed to us, the readers). Like the murdered actress, when the actresses ask for their motivation, they’re told to be sexy, to be “soda pop and apple pie,” so that’s what the murdered actress becomes. The actress who is cast in the film starts to be called by the murdered actress’s name by the media, and she looks into the mirror and sees the murdered actress’s face. It’s as if the murdered actress is being consumed by the media construction of herself, as if she never had a self to be characterized, until finally that self is permanently subsumed. “The girl with your name will film the death scene. She’ll knock it out of the park, the producers will say, you knocked it out of the park, shake her hand, linger with their touch. The girl with your name will be magnificent, the girl with your name will smile, smile, smile. The tabloids will say how she is you now, how she is just like you.” The murdered actress, the main character in the story, is characterized not by the details of her being, but by their flattening, by their erasure. Still, while flat descriptors might work for some pieces, other pieces need more illustration and “roundness” to work. One way to get to the heart of a quick, telling characterization is to consider what is different about your character. Instead of going for the surface description of telling what the character looks like or how the character walks, find that piercing, revealing detail that tells the essence of their character. We all feel singular in some way. I’ll venture to say that we all feel apart to varying degrees, no matter how much we might try to belong. So if you’re writing the story about a vampire, what is it that makes your vampire different from other vampires (and different from vampire stereotypes)? How does your vampire want to belong (or not belong)? Perhaps your vampire bites their fingernails. Or if you’re writing a superhero story, perhaps your superhero mumbles and slumps their shoulders. Cutting against the grain of expectations to reveal a character’s essence is one way to capture the fleeting profile of your

character. So nurture a disgust of banality, a disdain for the ordinary. Don’t be complacent. A complacent author creates complacent characters, characters content to exist in generalities, cliches, and stereotypes (much like the author of the biopic of the murdered actress above—in fact, he murdered her a second time by not giving her a life beyond stereotype in life). Does anyone in the world feel their existence as a stereotype? Don’t we all feel ourselves as unique, as somehow apart from others, as a being unto ourselves, full of nuances and contradictions and secrets and impulses and … the wonderful and sometimes horrible messiness of being a human? I once challenged myself to notice, truly notice, five things per day. That sounds easy enough, I know, but it wasn’t for me. Most of my days, when lived to the routine that most days require, turned out to be rote and without surprises. It’s easy to notice new and different things when traveling, but my challenge was to heighten my observations while going around the same track each day. Except it’s not exactly the same track: there were different people on the sidewalk, different moods in the air, and I was different as well, with different thoughts and emotions that framed my world. I had to practice pausing, looking longer, listening. I had to attune myself to dramatizing observations, not just recording them. I had to make demands of myself that took me out of the normal complacency we move through life with. In writing down my observations, I thought of myself as a choreographer, placing an observation into a performance to heighten it. It takes effort to unveil a hidden truth, to bring a reader face-to-face with an arresting or even dangerous encounter. A writer of brevity has to paint characters in deft brushstrokes, with the keenest of images in such limited space, in order to capture their essence. You’re not mirroring life so much as showing life. Your character’s background, all that makes them who they are, matters less than their immediate impact on the reader in that dash of words on the page. If story is character and character is story, ask yourself what is the most vital character trait to tell the story?

Flashpoint: You’re the Kind of Person Who …

I once listened to an episode of the WTF podcast with Marc Maron, and when his guest, David Cross, came on, he started giving Maron a hard time by building a farcical and damning characterization of Maron by riffing on the phrase, “You’re the kind of person who _____.” He repeated the phrase, each time filling in the blank with a damning characterization that made Maron seem more and more pathetic and questionable. Each repetition of “You’re the kind of person who _____” provided the opportunity to reveal something outside our expectations and experience of Maron. So, ironically, the “kind of person” frame really served to show how Maron was his own kind of singular mess. I thought this would make a good characterization exercise for two reasons: 1) it serves as practice for capturing a character through dramatic traits, and 2) it helps you work at building a story through character details. So, think of a character. Brainstorm some character traits. Push them to the hilt. Write seven sentences, each one beginning with, “She/He/They is the kind of person who _____.” See if each character trait can surprise in some way. You’ll not only end up with seven piercing character observations, you might end up with a story if each line escalates to the next, building a narrative.

CHAPTER 10

Writing for the Essence

Poetry is life distilled.

—GWENDOLYN BROOKS

JAPANESE AUTHOR YASUNARI KAWABATA was obsessed by capturing the essence of a story. Essence as the intrinsic, indispensable quality that characterizes something, an extract that holds the fundamental properties of something in a concentrated form, a perfume, a scent. Perfume comes from the Latin “per,” meaning “through,” and “fumum,” or “smoke.” Perfumes have been traditionally made by extracting natural oils from plants through pressing or steaming. In steam distillation, steam is passed through plant material, turning the plant’s oil into gas, and then the gas goes through tubes, where it is cooled and liquified. The oils are collected, then they’re blended together by a master, called a “nose,” who creates a scent with other ingredients and mixes it with alcohol. It’s a meticulous process that requires an intense patience and attunement to nuance to find the rare redolence that exists in quintessence. In his most strenuous effort to capture the essence of a story, Kawabata turned his acclaimed novel Snow Country, for which he received the 1968 Nobel Prize, into an eleven-page story, “Gleanings from Snow Country.” Kawabata completed the story just three months before his suicide in 1972. “Gleanings” pulls scenes almost intact from the novel, but Kawabata does not offer a condensed retelling, as one might expect; instead he becomes more suggestive. “Gleanings” moves without backstory, without the context of the novel, which

centers on a story of two people meeting on a train in a doomed love affair. “Gleanings” defines these characters as being more like particles floating through space, unattached, not moored in a particular world or pulled forward by a particular trajectory or fate. In his spare style, Kawabata intensifies images and excavates new facets of his novel. Why did he rewrite Snow Country as a short story? Did he suddenly realize that the novel, all of those pages, all of those words, didn’t serve the story—that the truth of the story required a smaller space, to be passed through smoke like a perfume? The novel was already written with brevity, focused around essence. In fact, Fred Chappell describes the novel as full of haiku in prose form. Did Kawabata realize at that point in his life, when his eventual suicide must have been on his mind, that we carry only a handful of essential images with us? The title is interesting to me because “Gleanings from Snow Country” isn’t a new title but hearkens back to the novel. He could have recast the images as an entirely new story, except he wasn’t interested in a new story. I wonder if Kawabata was telling us that the “gleanings” matter more—that the gleanings are the essence we need to pay attention to. His miniaturization intensifies the isolated images. He works with understatement and ambiguity as if they are part of his color palette. He writes behind a veil. Elusiveness permeates. Ambiguity and suggestiveness are tools to capture essence, he seems to say. The word essence carries the connotation of mystery because it’s often viewed as something that’s hidden. One must pay acute attention to realize the quiddity of something. Or, perhaps essences don’t lurk within things so much as we move through essences in life as we move through air, breathing oxygen without even thinking about our need to breath oxygen. When I look up from my computer, I see my dog sleeping on the couch, I see an oak tree outside my window, I smell a beef stew simmering on the stove. I’m taking in the world through its essences, as if detecting essences is a sense unto itself, my senses and my consciousness and my memories determining that the tree is an oak tree and not a palm tree or a cherry tree and that my little dog is not a cat. Essences belong to the “flesh of the world,” as the philosopher Merleau-Ponty said. We search for essences. It’s the writer’s job to capture essences in words. The senses come into play in a new, more intense, more nuanced way. A smell combines with the angle of light, which combines with a car door slamming outside, which combines with a memory that creates a mood, a moment on the

page. The music of language is a concentrating force as well. It creates intimacy with the rhythms of a writer’s imagination, its cadences communicating hints of irony or sincerity, humor or distress. The sounds give shape to the story. As you read you feel the story’s weights and measures, taste its consonants, absorb the essence of it in ways you might not even be able to name. The search for the essence of the essence drove Kawabata. He also wrote miniatures, “palm-of-the-hand stories,” which he said “flowed from my pen naturally, of their own accord.” It was the form he felt encapsulated his art, the one where “the poetic spirit of my young days lives on.” One might, in fact, say that his novels are essentially linked miniatures. Miniatures allowed Kawabata to focus on ambiguity as a narrative tool. The ambiguity creates different contours, curves that are spacious and deep because they open into deeper meaning rather than weaving connections and explanations. The irresolution of Kawabata’s stories speaks to the epic nature of our interior lives. In his story “The White Flower,” a writer tells his lover, “You bring a beauty like a fragrance that you can’t see with the naked eye, like the pollen that perfumes the spring fields. How shall I write it?” A writer knows that all of the words, all of the time in the world, can’t possibly describe such beauty, so he has to rely on a less perfect, a less comprehensive approach: “Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel,” he says. “I’ll sketch it in words.” A person’s soul, their beauty, can only be captured in its distillation. “The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind,” said Virginia Woolf. I think Kawabata might have been in search of a way to do two things at once: to give the body and mind of a story while also giving its essence, its poetry. Only by using the tools of brevity could the corpuscular be transformed into gleanings. Essence is about attentiveness. You deepen what you regard.

Flashpoint: The Scents of a Story

If finding the essence is a practice of distillation, then it’s time to distill one of your stories. Take one of your longer stories and identify its essence, the heart of

the heart of the story. Circle the words, the phrases, the moments that are the most crucial. Then, turn it into perfume. Concentrate it so that it’s 50 percent shorter. Then take that shorter version and reduce it by another 50 percent. You can add or edit text from your original, but make sure you’ve captured its essence. When you read the final version, its scent needs to be stronger, more alluring, more arresting than the original.

CHAPTER 11

The Sounds of Silence

There are chords within silence; harmonized stillness.

—DANIEL LIEBERT

“THERE IS NO SUCH thing as an empty space or an empty time,” said the composer John Cage. “There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.” It’s true. Try to find silence. Sound emanates. It slithers. It wafts. It envelopes. It hovers. It pricks. It meanders. It circles. But it doesn’t stay. Sound is always moving, leaving a residue, like the smoke of a cigarette, particles dispersing, evaporating. When I first read John Cage’s observation, I wondered if a story could be told through silences, silences that aren’t really silences, but silences that evoke, invite, conjure, assemble, and reassemble, like a John Cage composition. So much of life is about what happens in between things, after all. Words are only one part of a story. How can a story form itself around what is unsaid? “Every something is an echo of nothing,” said Cage. That statement is like koan you can ponder for a lifetime. It might explain the beginning of the universe, a type of big bang theory. It certainly explains the mystery of certain types of stories.

• • •

Writers are often advised to go into the world to observe people and places to gather descriptive details to animate their prose. They’re rarely advised to study silence. Sarah Manguso asks her students to study empty time, and themselves in empty time, by sitting in silence for an hour or so. Then she asks students to write five sentences about what happened without using the first-person pronoun. No feelings, just observations. It’s not meditation. She says she’s “trying to inflame their attention until that’s all they are: attenders to the actual.” By doing this exercise, she says, “the autobiographical echo chamber sort of fades into white noise, and when the listening or thinking self stops being conscious of the writing or recording self, a kind of pure sensibility is able to emerge.” Manguso’s exercise nourishes a keenness of observation that is necessary to observe small things. “If I can perceive and understand one small thing thoroughly, I gain a greater sense of peace and power than I’d feel having paid semi-attention to a vast thing,” she writes. In a similar vein, John Cage wrote about entering an anechoic chamber at Harvard, which is designed to trap all sounds made inside it. It is, essentially, the quietest place on earth. He heard two sounds, one high and one low. An engineer informed him that the high-pitched sound was that of his nervous system and the low one was of his blood in circulation. It spurred an epiphany for Cage that would focus much of his musical attention on ambient and accidental sounds as opposed to compositional ones. “Any sounds may occur in any combination and in any continuity,” he wrote about his process. John Cage’s music invites attention to each separate sound, but then it also encourages the listener to hear those sounds in random relation to each other. A short-short should operate in the same way.

• • •

I have nothing to say and I am saying it, and that is poetry as I need it.

—JOHN CAGE

Silences contain subtext. And the subtext of silence is a breeding ground for stories. I learned this from life before I learned it from stories. When I was young, too young to have good communication skills, I once dated a woman who tended to run out of rooms and slam doors behind her when we got into arguments. The overt code of any slammed door is, “I’m angry at you, I don’t want you in my life.” The true message, though, is usually, “You’ve upset me, and you’d better run after me and make everything better.” I always ran after her, but after several such arguments, I decided that slamming a door was an immature act, and I felt humiliated to always be in the role of running after her, so I decided that if you run out of a room and slam the door, you should have to live with your action. After she slammed the door during our next argument and I didn’t run after her, the silence began to crescendo. Not running after a lover is its own type of slammed door. The silence became a wall. The silence became a yearning. The silence became a sword. The silence spawned stories and emotions and thoughts that wedged their way between us, one of us in flight, but both of us waiting. In such a moment, one story layers itself on top of another. The silence rewrites stories on the brain’s synapses, strumming differing chords of memory and hopes and feelings, the echoes of so many other somethings. All of life is lived in the sphere of suggestions, juxtapositions of moments, none of them clearly delineated. An echo shifts the original sound, creating new textures, new surfaces, new meanings. It was then that I realized that silence is never just silence. The world doesn’t allow silence.

Flashpoint: Attending the Actual

Try Sarah Manguso’s exercise. Sit in silence for an hour. No checking your phone, no listening to music. Just sit in a room and pay keen attention to the random orchestra of the world around you. The silence, in other words. Then write five sentences about what happened without using the first-person pronoun. Don’t write your feelings or thoughts, just observations.

CHAPTER 12

Found Objects, Found Stories

I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.

—ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

THERE’S ALWAYS THE QUESTION: Do we find our stories or do our stories find us? It’s a little of both for me. I’ve always thought my true calling was to be a junk collector, perhaps even more than being a writer. I was either a rag picker in a past life or I will be in my next. I love patinas of rust. I love ragged, torn clothing. I love finding abandoned items on the street. I save old plastic jewelry, torn-apart wrapping paper, and random shiny objects in a big box called my “collage box.” Similarly, I keep a doc I call “stray phrases,” which is its own type of junk shop, a collection of odd sentences—stiff, voluptuous, rapturous, restrained, or just plain kooky, all of them special for a reason I likely can’t articulate. I just like them. W. H. Auden described a poem as being written by connecting the best lines from his notebook, which mirrors the way I tend to write. Somewhere in the mix of having kids (and not having much time) and living in a state of perpetual transition—on buses and subways, standing around on playgrounds—I started carrying a notebook in my back pocket, which was a type of net to capture stray thoughts, overheard conversations, lines from a book I was reading. My random jottings formed themselves into my creative process. The beauty of my jottings

is that they don’t demand anything. In fact, they’re likely not to turn into anything (even those that are written with passionate ambition). But I type them up and either place them in my “stray phrases” doc or in any number of other docs where I have works in various stages of dress and undress. I like walking through my inner junk shop to look for odds and ends as well. That’s the perfect metaphor for the way I like to write, the way I like to think and live. The more forlorn and blemished the object, the more I want to burnish it by putting it in a story. I’d be perfectly happy living on the Island of Misfit Toys. I want to write a rhapsody of rags. Which is why I find a kinship with artists who open the possibilities of what can be found and turned into art, whether it’s visual art or a story. Joseph Cornell was a storyteller who created narratives through bric-a-brac that he put together in boxes. He’d walk aimlessly through the streets of New York City, finding discarded treasures for his art: cork balls, metal springs, old photographs, dime-store trinkets, and so on. His art was defined by the hunt for the unwanted, for insignificant detritus, which he then archived and reassembled to make new worlds. He filled cardboard storage boxes with his found treasures and organized them in the basement of his mother’s house, where he lived, as if they were in a museum’s back room, each of them labeled. He attached the highest value to objects of little or no intrinsic worth. A box labeled “tinfoil” or “plastic shells” resided alongside another marked “Caravaggio, etc.,” hinting at Cornell’s belief that great painters were no more important than the discarded objects of everyday life. Cornell took these odd tools of his craft and made poetic “assemblages” or “shadow boxes,” known as “memory boxes” or “poetic theaters.” They were dreamlike miniature tableaux that revealed tiny, magical worlds full of parakeets, Renaissance portraits, Victorian knickknacks, maps. Cornell arranged the objects to create a story. “A cursory glance at Cornell’s boxes could lead you to think that he was constructing reliquaries for coveted possessions, when in fact his talent lay in alchemising commonly discarded objects into a visually compelling state of being,” wrote Deborah Solomon, his biographer. Cornell was famously reclusive. He never married or moved out of his mother’s house in Queens, and he rarely voyaged farther than a subway ride into

Manhattan, despite being besotted with the idea of foreign travel and obsessed with France. He created the shadow boxes to travel to new worlds, to escape through the motifs of birds, maps, and space. The boxes form themselves around a tension between freedom and constriction. “My boxes are life’s experiences aesthetically expressed,” he said. There’s been a rich tradition of forming art around “found objects” since the early twentieth century. Beyond Cornell, the sculptor Henry Moore collected bones, which he treated as natural sculptures as well as sources for his own work. Duchamp brashly displayed a urinal in an art gallery to recontextualize it as hallowed art. The quilter Rosie Lee Tompkins stitched together unbridled colors, irregular shapes, and variegated textures, which are jubilant and biting and reverent and talismanic all at the same time, mixing rich velvets, denim, faux furs, dish towels, the American flag, Mexican textiles, distressed T-shirts, and sequined silk together like an artist working with oils. In the case of writing, Slate writer Hart Seely found poetry in the speeches and news briefings of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, transforming the awkwardly oblique but philosophically compelling language Rumsfeld used in one of his news briefings into a poem called “The Unknown.”

As we know, There are known knowns. There are things we know we know.

We also know There are known unknowns. That is to say We know there are some things

We do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns,

The ones we don’t know We don’t know.

Seely published Rumsfeld’s “poetry” in the book Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld, essentially placing his musings in the same artistic pantheon of Duchamp’s urinal. The frame of art is as important as the object itself in creating the mysterious numen that defines what art is. As John Hollander put it, “Anyone may ‘find’ a text; the poet is he who names it, ‘Text.’” Charles Baudelaire was an urban collector similar to Joseph Cornell, but he collected the characters and motifs that formed the essence of Parisian life rather than actual objects, and by writing about the things he found on his urban meanderings, he elevated them to art. In Paris Spleen, a posthumous collection of Baudelaire’s prose poems, Baudelaire sought “to capture the beauty of life in the modern city.” The spleen in the title of the work refers not to the abdominal organ, but rather to the more literary meaning of the word, “melancholy with no apparent cause, characterized by a disgust with everything.” Paris Spleen traipses through vignettes of Parisian life and reveals the porousness of Baudelaire’s mind to the textures of the city. A vignette is akin to a swatch of fabric from one of Rosie Lee Tompkins’s quilts. The word vignette means “little vine” in French. It comes from the drawings of little vines that nineteenth-century printers used to decorate the title pages and beginnings of chapters, so by definition it’s a type of drawing, a sketch, something that sprouts in the margins without clear aim or direction. A vignette forms itself around a pause, a moment unanchored from time, a short impressionistic scene. Its purpose is to evoke a feeling, to trace an image, a mood.

The form served Baudelaire well because he declared that an artist must aspire to be a flâneur, a person who experiences the city as a detached spectator, able to “be at the center of the world and yet remain hidden” from it through meandering walks without destination. The vignette was the perfect form for the flâneur who walks through the crowded spaces of the city collecting swatches of scenes. The city isn’t a single or solid entity but a whorl of shifting relationships and moments moving to the pace of an anxious urban drift. Baudelaire was drawn by the lure of the street, the “chaos of mud and snow, crisscrossed by a thousand carriages, sparkling with toys and toffee, crawling with greed and despair, standard delirium of a metropolis, made to disturb the brain of the sturdiest solitary.” “I don’t tie the impatient reader up in the endless thread of a superfluous plot,” Baudelaire writes in the preface. “Pull out one of the vertebrae, and the two halves of this tortuous fantasy will rejoin themselves painlessly. Chop it up into numerous fragments, and you’ll find that each one can live on its own. In the hopes that some of these stumps will be lively enough to please and amuse you, I dedicate the entire serpent to you.” Baudelaire was searching for a new language for modern times, “a miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rhyme, supple enough and striking enough to suit lyrical movements of the soul, undulations of reverie, the flipflops of consciousness.” Do we need a new language to capture our modern times? A new use of space and text to capture fleeting time? A new view of the texts that increasingly fill our lives? In a text on Henri Lefebvre, Maurice Blanchot noted that “the everyday” is “what is most difficult to discover.” This everyday “belongs to insignificance; the insignificant being what is without truth, without reality, and without secret, but also perhaps the site of all possible signification.” It lies concealed behind events, ideologies, everything we are used to viewing as important; it lies in what the French novelist Georges Perec would later call the “infraordinary”: “what’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest.” The rest, all the rest. Brevity allows the rags and detritus of the everyday to become gems and jewels.

Precious because they might go unnoticed otherwise. But they are often what’s really going on, what’s most important, perhaps especially so in an age when so much text in so many different forms fills our lives. Flash fiction is one form of brevity that especially invites use of the “found object.” To be a junk collector is by definition a practice of looking at the world differently: finding purpose in other people’s castoffs, beauty in other people’s trash. Flash fiction is similarly experimental because brevity changes the contours of a conventional story. A flash story can be a list, a letter, a text exchange, a Twitter argument. “Part of the fun of writing them is the sense of slipping between the seams,” said Stuart Dybek. “Within the constraint of their small boundaries the writer discovers great freedom. In fact, the very limitations of scale also demand unconventional strategies.” Because of its size, flash fiction invites using forms of writing that we use every day, but in new, inventive ways. I’ve written stories in the form of customer reviews of Dansko clogs or a guest’s entry in a bed and breakfast log. Leesa Cross-Smith’s “Girlheart Cake with Glitter Frosting” is a recipe that comprises a feast of ingredients that make up girlhood. It begins, “POSSIBLE INGREDIENTS: Too much black eyeliner. Roses. Champagne from a can, champagne in a bottle. ‘Music to Watch Boys To’ by Lana Del Rey,” and then the story goes on to list more singers, authors, celebrities, songs, movies, and objects—creating a fast-running montage of the joys and conflicts of youth. Michael Czyzniejewski uses the form of an outline in his story “The BraxtonCarter-VanDamme-Myers-Braxton-Carter Divorce: An Outline.” Kathy Fish uses the form of a dictionary entry in her commentary on human nature, “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild.” Kim Magowan wrote a brilliant and hilarious one-hundred-word story, “Madlib,” in the form of a Mad Lib. Sam Martone uses the 404 error page on the Internet in his story “404—Page Not Found” to tell a long-winding story that builds on the cold tech speak of remediating an error with personal digressions of the page’s anonymous author. Lucy Zhang uses the how-to form in her sultry hybrid piece, “How to make me orgasm,” which also includes the intertextuality of engineering manuals, business speak, and cuisine to evoke her narrator’s sexual needs. The found objects don’t have to be narrative texts but can be more visually oriented. Alex McElroy uses a flow chart to tell the story of a son, a family, while showing the branching paths of living and dying in “The Death of Your Son: A Flow Chart.” And Kristen Ploetz tells the story of a character’s life

events through colors in “LifeColor Indoor Latex Paints®—Whites and Reds.” She inventively divides life into the colors of whites and reds, starts with the first light of birth (Hospital Light—AR101) and goes through childhood (Dandelion Fuzz—CH303) to young adult (Beer Foam—YA502) to the empty pillow of older years (Empty Pillow—SY701) on the white side. On the red side there’s a lost balloon (Lost Balloon—LN103), a popped cherry (Popped Cherry—LI205), and different life setbacks (Myocardial Contusion—LS405 and Blocked Call— LU605). Lydia Davis often takes text she finds in emails to form a story. “I enjoy awkward nonprofessional writing and incorrect language use partly because of the unexpected combinations that simply wouldn’t be produced by the brain of a practiced writer of English.” She describes the fifty-six pieces in her book Samuel Johnson is Indignant not as stories, but as a myriad of other forms: “meditations; parables or fables; an oral history with hiccups; an interrogation about jury duty; a traditional, though brief, story about a family trip; a diary about thyroid disease; excerpts from a bad translation of a poorly written biography of Marie Curie; a fairly traditional narrative about my father and his furnace, though ending in an accidental poem; and, scattered through the book, brief prose pieces of just one or two lines as well as one or two pieces with broken lines.” These are the kinds of “stories” I look to create from my doc of “stray phrases.” Text is two things at once, as Annie Dillard said about turning a found text into a poem. “The original meaning remains intact, but now it swings between two poles.” Indeed, a found text always has a complicating or dramatically expansive layer. For example, Lawrence Sutin’s A Postcard Memoir is constructed with duotone reproductions of postcards. Each postcard image, as if found in a box in the attic, is paired with a story, creating an odd juxtaposition that recontextualizes his past —Little League, his discovery of sex, his bar mitzvah, past loves. The episodes take on a different tone of narrative because they’re missives from the past. Flash can animate ordinary places of discourse, alert us to the stories within otherwise pedestrian prose. It allows one to walk through the world as a junk collector might, looking at the different narrative objects that surround us and wondering if they might be vessels for a story.

Flashpoint: Junk Collecting through Words

Collecting junk naturally leads to playfulness because of the way randomness and the accidental is part of the process. Go on a random search for text you might create a story with, or text that might stand alone as a story. Look at your junk mail, the letter you receive with a new credit card offer. Look through the emails in your spam folder. Go to the library and read through old newspapers or diaries. I just took a foray into my spam folder, and here are three things I found:

An email that began with the phrase, “Firstly let me apologise to you …” What a wonderful phrase to start a story with or use to characterize a character. An email from “Mr. Info.” A character named “Mr. Info” could take so many different forms: a know-it-all who always spouts the wrong information or an ominous figure in a sci-fi thriller. A subject line that reads, “Japanese Plant Mix Forces Fat Cells to Melt.” In fact, this three-thousand-year-old fat-dissolving tonic burns one pound of fat per day. This tidbit could spark stories from the absurd to the tragic.

See how you can give the “junk” you find a new and different life through the simple frame of a story, a new context. The junkyard of stories is a playground of possibilities.

CHAPTER 13

Story as Collage

I’m very fond of this phrase: “Collage is not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.” If you put together the pieces in a really powerful way, I think you’ll let a thousand discrepancies bloom.

—DAVID SHIELDS

FOUND OBJECTS CAN BE beautiful unto themselves, or their beauty can be the result of their assemblage, of their recasting and remixing to create a composition, a new environment, a new world that allows a “thousand discrepancies” to bloom. This transformation of a piece into a larger whole is the art of collage. “Collage is the twentieth century’s greatest innovation,” said the abstract expressionist painter Robert Motherwell. Motherwell might have said that in relation to visual arts, but the aesthetic of the collage has woven its way into all arts, whether it’s the remixing of rap or the intertextuality of postmodern writing. What better metaphor for life itself than a collage of sounds, images, smells, and textures? Coined by cubist artists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, the term “collage” comes from the French word coller (to glue)—so it’s a process of assemblage, of recombination, of seeking a whole, of representing a fractured self or world. There was plenty to glue together at the beginning of the century as the world was becoming more mechanistic and industrial, parts determining the whole. And then soon so much would be shattered apart and warped into new forms in

World War I. The war brought on explosions of all kinds—physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, and cultural—and one of the best ways to represent it was through an assemblage of materials such as newspaper clippings, tobacco boxes, tickets, candy wrappers, maps, fabrics, and trinkets. Artists ripped things apart and reassembled them to create pastiches of odd juxtapositions and distorted shapes, transforming a selection of parts into a new work in its own right. Cubists, who worked with fractured forms and deconstructed subject matter, embraced the collage approach because it enabled them to piece together a picture from dissimilar components. Also, unlike painting, collages did not risk appearing flat and allowed artists to evoke dimensionality in their work and convey the shapes of the materials. The Dadaists elevated the collage into new realms. Members of the movement were renowned for their innovative use of seemingly worthless or often overlooked items. By transforming ephemera into polished pieces, the Dadaists lifted the quotidian into a different context and challenged traditional perceptions of art. They created a dreamscape of the disjointed and the disconnected. They fused unlikely visual fragments for shocking and absurd effects. “Collage is the noble conquest of the irrational, the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them,” said the Dadaist painter Max Ernst. The collage aesthetic allowed artists to work with different materials, to use blocks, patches, scraps, chunks, and fragments to accentuate and dramatize the mundane, to speak to the flow of experiences and textures that surround us in a single day. The “ordinary” gained a type of majesty, a recognition of its importance and beauty. Writing with an emphasis on the fragment and on constructing a larger narrative through disparate pieces that are sliced and mixed and grafted together achieves similar effects. Narratives that use collage, no matter their length, always ask the question of juxtaposition, the ways that other stories will abut and rub up against them. One fragment speaks to another, flirts with another, contrasts another, curses another. Some short-shorts are tightly packed, neat, and sharp; others are ragged, forming a patchwork of stray threads unraveling. Every orbit begs the question of the extent of its sprawl and whether there is a center at all.

Most stories are constructed temporally, with a linear timeline as the spine, but a story that is organized in a collage is told more spatially. Motifs arise and fade into the text. Echoes and reflections are magnified. Irresolution permeates the story environment instead of resolution. You read through a mesh, through refraction. Nigel Krauth describes such a reading experience as reading radially, “a kind of reading ultimately devoted to finding a meaningful centre to the swirl of narrative elements presented, but which is prepared to wait … for the ways in and out of that centre to emerge.” Instead of writing toward the center, the writer writes away from the center in “different radiating avenues.” Reading is a matter of making synchronic relations. You search for patterns. Some are overt, some are hidden. The juxtaposition of disparate images can serve continuity or discontinuity, but it automatically creates a synthesis of meaning. The poet Carl Phillips says that we make art as containers for the ambiguity of life—“that we constellate meaning into the ambiguity of living.” The act of forming constellations (another word for collages in its way) is a way of making patterns, which is “the antidote to patternlessness and potential chaos, including the potential chaos of loneliness.” Patterns amid patternlessness is a theme that the poet Elizabeth Alexander weaves into her exploration of the collage aesthetic as a fundamental Black art form because of “the way that it mirrors the process of taking from many places and recombining in the new space.” In Collage: An Approach to Reading African-American Women’s Literature, she writes, “When African-American women ‘write’ their histories—specifically, the histories of their bodies, no matter how obliquely told—against the backdrop of distorted representation, they ‘deconstruct’ those represented selves in order to construct themselves anew and in their own terms. The process of collage mirrors that very process of identity construction.” She traces the collage aesthetic to the origins of African American quilting, seeing in quilts a “response to ceaseless scattering” in the way African American quilts were created from “bits of worn overalls, shredded uniforms, tattered petticoats, and outgrown dresses.” She links that quilting tradition to the artist Romare Bearden’s use of collage as a jumping-off point to explore the “referential dialogue between seemingly-disparate shards of various pasts and the current moment of the work itself” in works by Anna Julia Cooper, Ntozake Shange, and Audre Lorde.

Alexander says that African American intellectual consciousness is split multiply, so that it is a “simultaneous habitation of conflicting elements in the same space.” Collage is a form that, because it pushes the boundaries of genre, allows for the expression of this complexity. Multiplicity shapes the form itself, allowing for more layers of being to exist alongside each other. “Collage, in both the flat medium as well as more abstractly in book form and as a metaphor for the creative process, is a continual cutting, pasting, and quoting of received information, much like jazz music, like the contemporary tradition of rapping, and indeed like the process of reclaiming African-American history. African-American culture from the Middle Passage forward is of course broadly characterized by fragmentation and reassemblage, sustaining what can be saved of history while making something new. Fragmentation is then in its way coherent and distinctly myriad.” The process is part of the product. In Beardon’s collages, the process of cutting and pasting isn’t hidden; the torn edges are shown. By showing this, the “creative/constructive process itself is valorized as a crucial and aesthetic component of the path to artistic coherence, and, indeed, an avenue to understanding how ‘coherence’ itself is evaluated. By extension, when the genre ‘seams’ of a written text are legible, a similar process of selecting and assembling can be articulated.” Audre Lorde’s writing showed and explored how the seams of race, class, gender, and sexuality “spin and recombine.” In her book Zami she invented a name for the book’s new, collaged genre: “biomythography,” which combines autobiography, biography, and mythology in “a collaged space in which useful properties of given genres are borrowed and reconfigured according to their usefulness in the telling of the story of this particular African-American woman’s life,” says Alexander. Lorde says that each of us needs every one of those myriad pieces to make us who we are and to break free from diminishing concepts of identity. Lorde wrote, “When I say myself, I mean not only the Audre who inhabits my body but all those feisty, incorrigible black women who insist on standing up and say, ‘I am and you cannot wipe me out, no matter how irritating I am, how much you fear what I might represent.’” The self is comprised of multiple components within the self as well as evolved from multiple external sources, an African American women’s tradition or mythos, a collage.

“The act of writing itself becomes akin to stitching, in its way, or pasting, the pen as the needle working through personal and collective memory,” says Alexander. Lorde commented that she often found that she was expected to “pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole … whether it’s Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc.,” but she found that was a destructive way to live and create because it served to fragment her sense of self instead of integrating all of the parts of herself. “They want you to dismiss everything else. But once you do that, then you’ve lost because then you become acquired or bought by that particular essence of yourself, and you’ve denied yourself all of the energy that it takes to keep all those others in jail. Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.” A work that is shaped like a collage represents the multiple spheres of life we inhabit, the refractions of self, the blur of experiences. It allows a writer to be more inclusive to a world that is perspectivist and multicultural. We live in an age that is interdisciplinary and intersectional. We live in an age of the remote control, Alexa, and Google, where sounds and images, memes and ancient texts, can be called up on demand. We live in a swirl of odd shapes and sounds and juxtapositions. The text on the page needs a dimensionality to represent such a world. Such a work allows an author to design as much as write, said Jane Allison in Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative. “Text comes from texere, after all: to weave. Next, we can be conscious, deliberate, innovate in the paths we carve through our words.” Just as in the visual arts, constructing and shaping a narrative with a collage-like sensibility requires a different creative process. “In collage you’re doing it in stages so you’re not actually doing it right there. You first of all draw it on the paper, then you cut it up, then you paste it down, then you change it, then you shove it about, then you may paint bits of it over, so actually you’re not making the picture there and then, you’re making it through a process, so it’s not so spontaneous,” said the artist Paula Rego. The writer snips and glues, layers and nudges, positions and repositions text in much the same fashion. John Gardner describes such a process in stories “fictional pointillism.” In fictional pointillism, a writer works with snippets, or crots, moving “as if at

random from one point to another, gradually amassing the elements, literal and symbolic, of a quasi-energeic action. No rule governs the organization of such a work but that the writer be a prosepoet of genius. Even if he has some intellectual system for arranging his crots, the basic principle of his assembly is feeling. He shuffles and reshuffles his fragments to find the most moving of possible presentations, and he achieves his climaxes not, as in linear fashion, by the gelling of key events, but by poetic force.” Imagine that each crot is the patch of a quilt. When I look at a story quilt by Faith Ringgold or the even more collage-like quilts by Rosie Lee Tompkins, it’s more than just a quilt because of how I feel the shuffling and reshuffling of fragments as a poetic force. The quilt might have the real-world function of warmth, but it is a painting sewn with the choices of fabric, color, pattern, and juxtaposition. It is not mere decoration, but art. Writing in a collage-like way is a painterly process, a poetic process that focuses on texture as much or more than structure and practices the art of calibration, of balancing harmony and disharmony, of deciding what “in tune” or “out of tune” means in such a narrative style. The risk is “overrichness, the writer’s tendency to push too hard, producing an effect of sentimentality,” said Gardner. But the great advantage is the “focus on imagery whereby repeated images accrue greater and greater psychological and symbolic force.” This was the style I accidently employed for my story “Gerard and Celeste.” “Accidental” holds a hidden magic when it comes to collage. What accidental means in this case is that I wrote a series of twenty or so one-hundred-word stories about two characters, Gerard and Celeste. I had no plan for the stories, no character arc or plot in mind. In fact, when I wrote the first one, I didn’t know if there would be a second one. I kept writing them because I became more and more interested in the characters. When I published them in my collection of one-hundred-word stories, Fissures, they resonated with readers to the degree that I thought it would be interesting to bring them together more tightly, to put the pieces in a constellation of conversation with each other, so I took all of them and put them together into a longer story. I ordered them, made edits, wrote more when necessary, adjusted pieces for a different tone and pitch in their new environment, but in the end I created a story that can only be described as a collage of moments and scenes, emotions and thoughts, memories and realizations. My initial one-hundred-word stories were like patches of fabric that I then sewed together into a larger narrative.

Another label for a story like this is linked story, which is a popular form with flash-fiction writers (and, increasingly, novelists, who stitch together a series of short stories to form a novel, as Jennifer Egan did in A Visit from the Goon Squad, as Jean Chen Ho did in Fiona and Jane, and as Morgan Talty did in Night of the Living Rez). Flash-fiction writers can create an impressionistic mosaic through shorts that rub against each other and drift apart, building tension and deepening meaning with each new sliver of a story. The writer is transformed into a composer when writing with the collage aesthetic, I found, but more in the vein of the experimental composer John Cage’s definition of the composer as an “organizer of sound.” The writer organizes text. Sometimes a collage story might have a tight organizing principle, such as Yasmina Madden’s “Zero Sum Game,” which details a relationship through twenty-six paragraphs, each of them starting with a letter from the alphabet. We get different character traits and relationship dynamics in each section: “A is for admiration, which is what you want from him more than anything.” “C is for cunt, a word he likes to use a lot when you have sex.” “T is for telling yourself what you need to tell yourself.” “Y for yes which is what he says, without hesitation, when you tell him we should take a break.” The reader is invited to read not for an escalating plot line, but to string together connections, to accept and follow refractions, to enjoy the process of sifting through pieces of text. The text invites in a delight in following contours to curve this way or that, to luxuriate in diversions. “If I’m reading a book and it seems truly interesting, I tend to start reading back to front in order not to be too deeply under the sway of progress,” said David Shields. The sway of progress, or any sort of governing order, for that matter, becomes less and less important in collage. The collage aesthetic holds a disdain for directness. Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever is the perfect novel recommendation for Shields. The book is written in 536 numbered sections (some have titles, some don’t), most of them small enough to fit on an index card. The novel feels antic, random, tossed off, and sometimes a bit feral. Robison has said that the guiding

structure was her distraction, and that the order of the snippets doesn’t really matter. In fact, she says you could read the snippets from the end to the beginning, and the novel wouldn’t read dramatically differently. It is a genuine collage, a kaleidoscope of scenes, observations, and thoughts. Juxtaposition forms the narrative pulse. You’re carried by randomness, the narrative’s openness to accident and serendipity, humor mixing with pathos. Her writing process was similarly random. “I would go out, take a notebook. Or drive, or park wherever and take notes. I would note anything left. Anything that still seemed funny or scary or involving for four seconds. Some berserk conversation I overheard. The crap on the radio. This big, brilliant cat. Ridiculous weather. Then it was months before I read over the scribbles and realized they had a steady voice, and that there were characters and themes.” She decided that since this was the only writing she was doing that she’d try to make it interesting for others to read, so she gave the sections different headings and typed them onto index cards. She took “a more fictive approach to the narrative, and then, pretty literally, assembling it. Still, I never did give it a hat or shoes, and if you read the pages in reverse order, they work about the same.” Can the novel truly be read randomly? Does her instinct for structure carry it through? You read because there is always meaning being made. You follow the voice, the style instead of the plot, enjoying the jukes and swerves of the story, jumping over the narrative gaps. It’s an aesthetic of sharp cuts, an exercise of refractive portraiture. “All the little sections are employed differently,” she said. “They’re meant to have different jobs. And that’s as far as I was able to go in providing a customary shape for the story.” The French writer Marc Saporta wrote a novel that he literally meant to be ordered by the reader. Composition No. 1, the first ever book in a box, was published in 1962 as 150 pages that could be shuffled and reshuffled and read in any order. In the first English edition, the loose leaves were bound by a rubber band. It didn’t look like a bound and finished novel, but more like a draft manuscript that had just been printed. Saporta instructed his readers to shuffle the pages like a game of cards and hinted at a rationale for his experiment: to play with the idea that “the time and order of events control a man’s life more than the nature of these events.”

It’s a reading experience that Joseph Frank describes in his essay “The Idea of Spatial Form” as “a species of fiction in which juxtaposition or association replaces temporal order, each piece a part of a puzzle, or the whole forming a network of sense.” Nigel Krauth viewed the book not as an accidentally spilled manuscript but as autonomous microstories, each fitting on a page and less than 250 words. Instead of trying to piece the fragments into a linear unity, he said he read the “novel” “rhizomically—allowing the pieces to sit unfixed in a constellation in my mind as I press on.” Each story is put into a holding pattern that swirls rather than flows. There are a number of literary forms that have collage in their makeup. For example, the literary form the cento (which comes from the Latin term derived from Greek, κεντρόνη, meaning “patchwork garment”) is composed entirely of lines from other works, essentially creating a collage of prose hinging on the writer’s creative ability to bring lines from other authors together in unison and turn them into a new, original work. With the cento, the writer does not edit but, instead, compiles. Focused on arrangement and form, portions of the original work are left intact, but they’re completely remastered and reimagined. There’s also the cutout poem or story, popularized by the Dadaists, which involves cutting sentences, phrases, and words from existing texts and putting them together in a random jumble. The form emphasizes disconnection and disjointedness. Context and wholeness are erased. A world is lost, but its bits and pieces can be reassembled into something new. Leonard Cohen famously wrote in his song “Anthem” that “There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” The collage allows for an infinite fracture that invites in multiplicity, an intercrossing of opposed, complementary, and ever-shifting centers. “What is complexity, but a lot of simple things strung together?” asked Steve Fellner.

Flashpoint: Collage as Story

Take a text, any text—the sports page, the federal tax code, People Magazine— and pick out thirteen sentences. Put them in a hat and pull them out one by one and order them sequentially. That’s story no. 1. Now, arrange them in your own way to make a story. That’s story no. 2. Reflect on how each story works or doesn’t work for you, how randomness and intentionality work in collage. Donald Barthelme once wrote that “the most essential tool for genius today” was rubber cement. He created stories he called “slumgullions” that were a cauldron of artifacts that bring to mind Kurt Schwitters’s or Robert Rauschenberg’s work in all of the disjointed found material he glued together on the page. What can you glue together?

CHAPTER 14

Going Small to Go Big

The Art of Expansion

It might seem almost impossible to enclose the great movement of the universe in such a narrow space. But through a kind of magic, the poet manages to make the infinite enter into that small cell. There, every surprise may fit.

—JORGE CARRERA ANDRADE

PERHAPS THE BIGNESS OF a story isn’t best measured by its page count. A tiny story might be as “big” as any tome in some authors’ hands. Jorge Luis Borges wrote short stories that were so capacious they seemed to hold universes. His signature style came about in an unlikely way. On Christmas Eve of 1938, Borges suffered a severe head injury, and during treatment he nearly died of sepsis. While he was recovering, he decided to test his imagination to see if he could still write, and he began exploring a new style of writing that would become so singular that he’s one of the few writers whose name warrants an adjective, “Borgesian.” The first story he wrote after his accident was “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” and it marks the beginning of a style of short stories that spawned much bigger worlds. The story is written in the form of a book review about Pierre Menard, a fictional eccentric twentieth-century French writer and polymath. The central topic of the essay describes Menard’s efforts to go beyond

a mere “translation” of Don Quixote by immersing himself so thoroughly in the work as to be able to actually “re-create” it, line for line, in the original seventeenth-century Spanish. Borges uses the form of a book review to spawn the larger work. We imagine Pierre Menard literally copying Don Quixote word by word, and it seems absurd that a mere copy of Don Quixote is being discussed in literary terms. But then there’s the question: What if an author wrote Don Quixote now? It would be a huge achievement, just as it would be a huge achievement to write Hamlet or Moby Dick now. It might even be a bigger achievement than the “original.” Borges’s story opens up how the human action of writing and reading a work affects meaning. So this three-page review opens up three stories: the story of Don Quixote, the story of Pierre Menard, and the story of authorship—an author’s relationship to their historical context, appropriation, and interpretation. This single story is worthy of a semester-long seminar, a dissertation. It’s not just a short story. Instead of writing big books on vast subjects, Borges decided that writing their essence, communicating their meaning through suggestion, was more efficient and meaningful. As he noted, “The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance…. A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary.” The magic potion of a small story that holds big universes. Borges often uses fantastical themes to allow his short stories to open up into bigger works, such as in “The Library of Babel,” which presents a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format and character set. The library is made up of an enormous expanse of adjacent hexagonal rooms, like an infinite honeycomb. In each room there is an entrance on one wall, the bare necessities for human survival on another wall, and four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books are random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of twenty-five basic characters (twentytwo letters, the period, the comma, and the space). The library, nearly infinite by definition, invites an endless search because even though the vast majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous

version of every one of those books. So the quest is to find all of the useful information, which would include biographies of any person and translations of every book in every language known to humans. Of particular importance is the narrator’s ability to conceptualize the infiniteness of the library only intellectually; since he can only experience a tiny part of the library in his lifetime, it is through inductive reasoning that he comes to believe the library is infinite and not merely indefinite. The theme of infinity is also shown through the symbol of mirrors. The narrator notes that there is a small mirror that “faithfully duplicates appearances” in each room of the library. The narrator remarks that some librarians think this signals that the library is not infinite, while he himself sees it as “a figuration and promise of the infinite.” The mirror’s ability to duplicate a room and create “more” of the library out of nothing gives the narrator a concrete hint of how the library itself might go on infinitely. It’s a story told through the technique of implication. Despite the expansiveness of the library’s infinity, the narrator notes that even after a lifetime of searching for a particular book, he is “preparing to die, a few leagues from the hexagon where I was born.” Through the fact that the narrator has only witnessed a tiny part of the infinite library, Borges suggests that each human will only get to experience a small amount of the mysteries and possibilities of life. The concept of the library is analogous to the view of the universe as a sphere having its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere. Borges understood that we live largely in the realm of implication. We think with implication. One thing implies another thing. But living by implication means living without certainty because you’re always in between, floating between two worlds. Although Borges’s use of labyrinths, mirrors, chess games, and detective stories creates a complex intellectual landscape, his language is clear. It’s in his ironic undertones where so much of the expansiveness resides. He presents the most fantastic of scenes in simple terms, seducing us into the forking pathway of his seemingly infinite imagination. There’s a paradox of amplification through subtraction. Borges creates a land of suggestion, of association. Italo Calvino said, “Borges opens his windows onto the infinite without the slightest busyness, in a style that’s utterly clear and sober and airy—as if telling stories through summaries and glimpses results in the most precise and concrete

language, the inventiveness of which lies in its rhythmic variety, its syntactic movement, its unexpected and surprising adjectives.” Calvino pursued his own expansiveness through brevity. In If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, he said his goal “was to give the essence of the novelistic, but condensed into ten beginnings, which develop in very different ways from a common nucleus and which act upon a frame story that both determines them and is determined by them.” The story is about the reader trying to read a book called If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Each chapter is divided into two sections. The first section of each chapter is in second person and describes the process the reader goes through to attempt to read the next chapter of the book he or she is reading. The second half is the first part of a new book that the reader (“you”) finds. It’s a technique of dilation. The frame of a story opens up a story, as if the author is allowing the reader to look through a tiny hole that reveals a huge and expanding universe. The review of a long book makes the heft of the book a reality because in reading a review, you have to imagine the book. Or, in the case of Calvino, the fragments of a novel suggest the bigger story and comment on the collaborative nature between writer and reader in the reading of a work. Dawn Raffel uses Calvino’s dilatory technique in her flash story “Three Cities” (an homage to his Invisible Cities) in which she writes a single paragraph about each city in a way that opens up an immensity through the simple force of suggestion. In “The City of Infinite Names” she captures how simple naming conventions alter our sense of the world, our sense of self: “Everyone is lost here, even the mice. The old folks wander alone or in groups, searching for home, but the streets have new names, have turned in different directions. The city itself changes name every hour. At one it is Los Santos. At two it is Poteryannye Serdtsa. Each day is different. Each minute is the same.” Calvino summed up his writing approach as “the subtraction of weight” in his book Six Memos for the Next Millennium. “I have tried to remove weight from human figures, from celestial bodies, from cities. Above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of the story and from language.” It’s an interesting and paradoxical technique: to gain size by subtracting weight. Proportion can alter and heighten reality in incisive, revealing ways. Sometimes showing things in miniature is the best way to capture the enormity of the drama.

I think of the photographer Laurie Simmons, who stages domestic scenes using dolls and miniature objects. Many of the scenes are constituted with nostalgic imagery associated with the home and the homemaker’s role in it. The dolls, most of them women, are mute surrogates, trapped in their prescribed roles, yet they evoke human emotions in startling ways even though they’re not human. In the photo “Untitled (Woman Standing on Head),” there’s a doll in a miniature kitchen, complete with countertops, sink, stove, and refrigerator. The doll is clad in the dress and high heels of a suburban housewife, with neatly bobbed hair. Everything is “normal” in this middle-class home, except for the disruption of this aberrant, desperate move—to be doing a handstand on the tiles, surrounded by miniature plates and cutlery strewn across the floor. It’s not a playful headstand, not a joyful one. The doll isn’t doing yoga. She’s hysterical, lunging out of the expectations of what it means to be a woman and a wife, turning herself upside down. The photo is the most extreme of a series of images taken by Simmons showing the doll in various positions around the kitchen, sometimes simply sitting at the table or standing in the corner. The effect of presenting such miniature dramas with dolls and tiny toy furniture instead of humans in real kitchens heightens the reality of the domestic scene, making it more horrific and soulless. The miniatures have a way of enlarging the strictures of middle-class life. “The challenge has always been to wrest emotion out of a doll face that we think of as only having one emotion,” said Simmons. It’s not just about photographing dolls, but how Simmons photographs the dolls. Each photo is a pretend photo realism, and it’s because the style is situated in photo realism that it takes on surreal commentary. The viewer is in between the real world and the doll world, as if trapped in a dream. The miniature nature of the doll world creates a bigger world—as in the work of Borges—magnifying the absurdity and the confinement of such a life. The use of a pretend world to comment on the confines of real life and open up a larger story is also a technique Courtney Watson uses in her one-hundred-word story “Hard Time.”

Hard Time

Joe ordered his first kit from a hobby magazine sent to his cell mate. The house was an antebellum plantation with a blue-papered bathroom and white columns. It had staircases and a library full of tiny books with real pages. The house was populated by little doll people, also ordered from the back pages, who would never, ever in their little doll lives rob the doll bank, armed with a tiny doll gun, shoot two of the doll tellers, and be sent to doll prison. It just wouldn’t happen. Not when they had a place like this to call home.

“Hard Time” makes the miniature home the place of comfort and innocence and joy. It’s a place to escape to, a place where the stereotypes of home life are supportive and nourishing, but such a home is only a place of imaginary escape serving to highlight the harsh life Joe has lived and will live. Miniatures change our perspective of a story. You dive into a novel. You run down a path. You crisscross space and time. You feel a world being built, an expanse. You stand above a miniature, though. You’re a god looking at a tiny world with space all around it. Like a dollhouse, you can pick it up and see all around it, yet it has a way of enveloping you. It’s a paradox: in tiny things, a large world is created.

Flashpoint: Expanding through Shrinking

I was driving across Nevada once, and I marveled at the beauty of its vast, barren landscape. I was driving on Highway 50, “The Lonely Highway,” which follows the trail of the Pony Express, so I couldn’t help but try to imagine the lives of the people who had lived in such a rugged and uninviting place. When I stopped to eat or fill the car with gas, there would be tourist trinkets, postcards, or markers telling about the history of the road. Caught up in the excitement of the trip, I thought I should write a huge historical novel, going from the beginning of Nevada’s history to the present—a tome to

rival any historical novel by James Michener. I really wanted to write that book, but I realized I’d sadly never have the time. Then I thought I could write the novel in just a few pages. An epic shouldn’t be measured solely by its number of pages, after all. Charles Simic called Franz Wright “a miniaturist whose secret ambition is to write an epic on the inside of a matchbook cover.” That’s what I essentially wanted to do in my “novel” about Nevada. I decided to return to that novel-writing exercise I mentioned earlier: to write a novel in a single page. Now it’s your turn: write a one-page novel. And don’t forget: the inside of a matchbook cover can hold more than you think it can.

CHAPTER 15

Going Small to Go Small

I experience intensely only the tiny feelings of the tiniest things.

—FERNANDO PESSOA

I OFTEN MAKE THE mistake of emphasizing that a flash story is a little box that can contain big things. That’s a mistake because when I strive so strenuously to cloak flash in such bigness I’m filling an insecurity—the need to prove flash’s worth by proving that it’s not small, that it can hang with the big boys and girls. There’s nothing wrong with flash being a small box that holds small things, though. Small things don’t need to be justified. A bird’s tiny song provides solace in the raucous clamor of city sounds because of the very smallness of its song. If it became big, the song would be something else entirely. Let’s celebrate tininess for the sake of tininess and not think of the small as lacking bigness as if a big thing has more validity, more importance. The small has its own language, its own special timbre.

Flashpoint: Celebrate Tininess

Write a story (or stories) on a piece of cardboard, a notecard, a postcard—any small object—and hang them from trees in your neighborhood, attach them to

helium balloons, leave them on a restaurant table, hang them on a café bulletin board, or tape them to a doorway. Give tiny stories away, spread them all around in celebration, because that is one special thing about tiny things: they are easy to give away.

CHAPTER 16

The Poetics of Brevity

A short story is closer to the poem than to the novel (I’ve said that a million times) and when it’s very very short—1, 2, 2 ½, pages—should be read like a poem. That is slowly. People who like to skip can’t skip in a 3-page story.

—GRACE PALEY

I TRACE MY TRUE introduction to the aesthetic of brevity to Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” which I first read as a college undergraduate. I didn’t know what flash fiction was at the time, and I’d just decided to become a writer, so I knew little of literary history, but after I read Pound’s two simple lines, I carried the idea of brevity with me.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

The title of the poem operates as an evocative line in the poem, anchoring us in a subway station. Then an entire world is evoked through simplicity. The poem offers just a moment of perception, yet that moment contains so much. The apparition of the faces gives a sense of liveliness, a world in motion, brightness in a dark subway station. The faces and the petals are conjoined, as if residing in the gauzy textures of an impressionist painting. There’s a delicacy to all, the images so mysterious and moody that they would risk being ruined by a single

word more. Pound wrote, “The image itself is speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language.” This poem goes far beyond the words in it. I think of Lu Chi’s advice on capturing detail in his classic The Art of Writing:

When the vein of jade Is revealed in the rock The whole mountain glistens

A single striking act of noticing acts as a “vein of jade” in Pound’s poem. Pound was influenced by the haiku, a form of poetry that in English is generally just seventeen syllables long. Often the poems are broken into three lines, with five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the next, and five syllables in the last line. Haikus work with empty space as if it’s an unresolved ellipsis, a breath forever held. It’s a form designed around ambiguity, so a writer has to accept the mind-set of uncertainty. It’s also an expression of an awake experience, though, like a flash story in the sense that flash is often a burst of illumination. Haikus form themselves around their attentiveness to time and place; the short form invites concentrated observation and meditation on a single thing as a way to discover its true nature. “Haiku is an art that seems dedicated to making people pay attention to the preciousness and particularity of every moment of existence,” says Robert Hass. In haiku, the weather and the seasons often play a significant role, bringing the writer into play with the mysterious sensations of life. The more piquant and original the images, the better. “The old verse can be about willows,” said the haiku master Matsuo Bashō. “Haikai requires crows picking snails in a rice paddy.” The purpose is to seize on a moment and to render it as purely and crisply as possible. The form is designed to notice only what is in the moment, to experience and capture a purity of awareness. Pause and think about this. When have you achieved a purity of awareness? Does it last as long as an hour? A day? It’s

usually a moment, isn’t it? You can’t take a photo of it, although it feels like a photo. I know of no better way to capture it than in the short form. Consider the following:

Peeling a pear— a trickle of sweet juice along the blade

—MASAOKA SHIKI

I like this haiku because it captures the moment when our purposeful drive, our pushing of the knife, yields to the juiciness of the world at hand. Haiku asks us to step out of our skin, to connect to the spirit of the world around us. There’s something about an aesthetic of brevity that touches upon the mystical, the ineffable, as a pathway to the truth. Often haiku live in an enigma:

A flea-bite also; when she is young, is beautiful

—KOBAYASHI ISSA

Is the bite itself ironically beautiful, or is a flea bite beautiful only when young —a commentary on how such physical discomforts or blemishes hold different valences at different ages. Or is it a memory of a prick of youth, the prick appreciated now in a way it wasn’t then? It can be all of those things at once, can’t it? That’s what a powerful image is capable of. There’s also Basho’s famous haiku of the frog leaping into the pond:

The old pond A frog leaps in. Sound of the water.

This haiku, which nearly everyone in Japan knows, defines the form in that an action brings together the external and internal worlds. There’s a leap of being, an immersion, and the recognition of something observed in the sound of the frog plopping into the water. It’s a moment you share, but in its passing it is one you can’t possess. A haiku’s beauty resides in that pivot between external world and internal recognition. It’s a moment akin to Nathalie Sarraute’s tropism. It’s a way of coming home to yourself. Brevity makes us realize how the complicated world is made of simple elements. You hold one thread of the skein of a messy life, which is what all lives so easily become or seem. The haiku has evolved in many different ways over the years, showing how the techniques of brevity bridge sensibilities of the past and the present. The Beats, in particular, embraced the form and brought their rollicking sense of playfulness (and lawlessness) to it. Kerouac popularized the haiku in the United States in his 1958 novel, The Dharma Bums, when the character based on Kerouac and the character based on the poet Gary Snyder are climbing Matterhorn peak in California, and Snyder remarks that a “real” haiku should be “as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing,” and he proposes that probably “the greatest haiku of them all” is by Shiki: “The sparrow hops along the veranda, with wet feet.” You can see the wet footprints “like a vision in your mind,” says Snyder, “and yet in those few words you also see all the rain that’s been falling that day and almost smell the wet pine needles.” Other Beat poets

such as Allen Ginsberg and Philip Whalen helped to establish the haiku zeitgeist of the 1960s, and Kerouac Americanized the haiku form, calling them “pops” to match the playful spirit he approached them with.

Two Japanese boys singing Inky Dinky Parly Voo

Bird suddenly quiet on his branch—his Wife glancing at him

Kerouac was also known to fuse haiku and jazz and give jazzy improvisational readings of his haiku, which can be heard on Kerouac’s 1958 album, Blues and Haiku, on which his haiku readings are accompanied by the jazz saxophonists Zoot Sims and Al Cohn.

In my medicine cabinet The winter fly Has died of old age

A bird on the branch out there

—I waved

Kerouac said that haiku must be “very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella.” Although Kerouac is famous for his “spontaneous prose” approach to novel writing, he said in a 1968 Paris Review interview that haiku are “best reworked and revised” in order to achieve simplicity: “It has to be completely economical, no foliage and flowers and language rhythm, it has to be a simple little picture in three little lines.” A simple little picture:

The summer chair rocking by itself In the blizzard

In many ways, short-shorts, especially the smallest stories categorized as microfiction, are the prose version of haiku. Like a haiku, a flash story is an imagist’s medium. A striking image connects us with the unconscious, offers a path to the dreamworld. Shapes shift, and otherworldly possibilities arise. In such displacement, there is a peculiar kind of placement. The image is carrying us. Sometimes, we can literally feel lifted by it. “Within a good image, outer and subjective worlds illumine one another, break bread together, converse. In this way, image increases both vision and what is seen,” wrote Jane Hirshfield. The word metaphor originally meant “to carry” or “to transfer” in Latin and Greek. It carries meaning, but it also carries a story itself, which is why Hirshfield says images, metaphors, and similes are “sliding doors, places of opening through which subjective and objective may penetrate and become each other.” A metaphor helps the mind play with its well-trod patterns of thought, and in the way it introduces strangeness and makes the familiar unfamiliar, it can even help reroute those patterns.

Images take on a more prominent place in short-shorts than they do in longer works because they serve to resonate and enlarge a work, to carry the work and let it speak beyond the page. Sometimes the image becomes almost like a main character itself, as in a poem. An image that carries a work with its symbolic weight is a fusion of inner and outer environments, a marriage of reality and fantasy. Sharp, arresting, and sensual images deepen our experience of a story, invoke memories, and invite us to take part on a physical and sensory level. One image connects to another, adding nuance and flavor to an idea. Images move us, and in moving us, they move stories and poems forward in mysterious ways, almost as if the image is a verb itself. At the same time, a metaphor requires us to pause, to slow down, to take in a story as if reading a poem. “The surprise and density of metaphor require unpacking, and in the process of unpacking, the reader experiences the effects of a longer story. That’s why, to me, the best flash fiction invites readers to slow down rather than speed up,” said Pedro Ponce. Ezra Pound, in his essay, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” says, “An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instance in time…. It is the presentation of such a ‘complex’ instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation, that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest work of art.” To gain that sense of freedom, Pound emphasized finding the “luminous details” that animate an image, the revelatory details that make us feel as if we have participated in an experience. An image is not good because it is scientifically precise in the accuracy of its details but because of its illuminating qualities—the way it awakens a mood, a feeling, or an idea while it draws us a picture. Description and evocation are two very different things. “No ideas but in things,” as William Carlos Williams famously proclaimed. An image requires study, probing, excavation, and precision. You must become, as the novelist Wallace Stegner once put it, “an incorrigible lover of concrete things.” You have to devote yourself to attention. Although in our highly visual culture we tend to think of the visual by default, some of the most evocative imagery engages the nose, the ears, the sense of touch, or taste. And beyond. Although we’re taught that humans have five senses, some posit that we have as many as thirty. Consider the sense of balance, the sense of movement, the sense

of time passing. Or there are senses that only other animals have, such as the ability to feel electrical fields, or, like bats, to feel the earth’s magnetic field. Like a poet, the flash writer searches for the singularity of a moment—the lyric moment. It is the pure experience of an object, an intense concentration that supersedes self. The lyric provokes a connection of states between the writer and reader. A description is born in consciousness attuned to the pulse of life. Behind all good description is a hunger to know the world more, to truly taste it. It’s not decorative. It’s not just looking at things closely, but the practice of careful looking. Description is a type of assertion of a world view. It holds its own metaphysics, its own position on what things are and what things can be. Language becomes its own “sixth sense,” in fact, providing a different way to access experience, defamiliarizing at the same time it familiarizes. Ask yourself how your choices of language encourage a reader to make associations. Consider Pound’s dictum: “Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.” To find the language of revelation, you have to inhabit an image, connect it with other images, and reimagine it. Brevity asks us to look at things anew—to re-see the world, to re-see the language we use for describing the world, to cease taking these things for granted. It’s like looking in the mirror and not quite recognizing yourself—you feel a little estranged, you pause in wonder to look closer, and then you see yourself with seemingly different eyes, at a different angle. You’re awake to new details, a different experience of self. A metaphor isn’t ornamental. It should serve to transform, to take us to a new place, to disrupt and renew. It’s such a difficult task to be able to capture the essential exquisiteness of an image, to find a way for its details to illuminate, that Ezra Pound said, “It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.” Ponder these evocative images and consider how they evoke a moment more powerfully by decentering language as a way to recenter it:

The sun had become a light yellow yolk and was walking with red legs across the sky.

—ZORA NEALE HURSTON, SERAPH ON THE SUWANEE

The heavy smell of flower petals stroked the walls of my lungs.

—HARUKI MURAKAMI, THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE

Every word, every detail matters. A piercing precision is key. Flaubert’s idea of the mot juste becomes a guiding aesthetic principle. It’s a style of recontextualization, dislocating conventional perceptions and recasting them into something new and more dramatic. A metaphor might often be made, but they’re just as likely to be discovered. Here is why the freedom to play is sacred. Connect words that don’t usually go together. Search for latent connections and meanings. Feel the materiality of language. Let language use you. Flash also uses emptiness to enhance its imagery, a characteristic common to the Zen-influenced arts. For example, in ikebana, Japanese flower arranging, sumptuousness is paired with austerity. The unfilled space is part of the composition, just as silence is part of John Cage’s compositions. Barthes wrote that the haiku’s “absence” created an “echoless breach of meaning.” One reads haiku, Barthes said, to “suspend language, not to provoke it.” As Bashō said, “The secret of poetry lies in treading the middle path between the reality and the vacuity of the world.” Simplicity too often goes underappreciated because it is so simple. Spare detail and casualness of tone can make a story or poem seem deceptively easy when the opposite is the case. “It takes such perfect intuition to know to shut up like this, to know that all you have to do is get the crack started and let the crack continue in the reader,” writes Kay Ryan, who is known for spare and simple poems that are inimitable in my mind (I say as one who has tried). Such intuition comes from years of practice, from experiencing many moments of not trusting how a hint must remain a hint to “let the crack continue in the reader.” I think of Lao Tzu, who espoused the principles of absence, noticing how spokes that gather at the hub of a wheel work because of the space between them, or

how a jar made with clay works because of the space that it holds. “Presence gives things their value,” he wrote, “but absence makes them work.” Small openings lead to big openings. Nothing can be fully described, but even the tiniest poem or story can speak to the largest of cosmos. “A poem can know more than we can know,” Ryan says. “It must.” And perhaps that’s Ryan’s guiding principle, how she knows not to try to add more, why trusting in lightness works better than trusting in weight: the poem has to know more than we do. One of the most oft-repeated mantras of writing workshops is: “Show, don’t tell.” But in many poems and in flash fiction, showing and telling take a different form. You gesture, you suggest. Absence—not showing—is as powerful as showing. Absence is a key part of the flower arrangement.

Flashpoint: Image Exercise

The crucial narrative technique of a horror movie is not to show the monster but to make the monster live in the imagination as a threat, lurking in a forest or an attic. Horror stories work because of anticipation, because of slowly accumulating fear, not because of blood-spattered gore (an overused and ineffective technique). The key in building anticipation is to focus on the small things. A single strand of hair on a vanilla cupcake will do as much to repel people as any blood-and-guts killing. Think about the moods a story can embody. Do you want the story to be lush and sensuous? Crowded? Fevered? Dark? Now write a series of images that speak to each of these moods. Think of the way each image can tie together external and internal worlds. See if the images can grow into other motifs that might weave their way into a story.

CHAPTER 17

Is It Poetry or Prose?

Once upon a time there was a little bit of plot and a lotta bit of letting go of plot. There was putting some pretty in, some sweet tweet, and ’idn’t it swell too when there’s fetching kvetching and weird’s plopped in a box to play with trees and wires and bang the conundrums, though most of all I adore how marginal the margin becomes: it just falls plumb, Bob, down the right side, taking out the lineated huffnpuss of breath, leaving the plainly more said.

—BOB HICOK WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE between prose poetry and a short-short? It’s a question I’m often asked because people like categories and definitions and labels. It’s unfortunate that the words “poetry” and “prose” are often pitted against each other as opposing forces, as if they’re two different species, as if they can’t coexist. The difference between them is sometimes very little. A poetic text is marked by indirections—displacement (such as metaphor and metonymy), distortion (ambiguity and contradiction), and the creation of textual space (symmetry and rhyme)—just as a flash story can be. Flash blurs the lines of prose poetry because it relies less on explanation and more on evocation, undermining narrative structure just as prose poems undermine lyric structure. A flash story is by definition an intersection, something in between, just as a prose poem is. A prose poem seeks brevity, just as a flash piece does. A prose poem seems to ask the reader if it’s a poem or not just as some short-shorts ask if they’re a story or not. Some strive to answer the question while others linger on the question, refusing the ingredients of it. So what to say of a piece that focuses on rich imagery and lyric intensity but wraps itself around the studs of a story—a story that has rhythm, sonorous

effects, syncopation … a story that moves primarily with lyric energy, that seems to want to be a poem? Irving Howe wrote that flash fiction “is fiercely condensed, almost like a lyric poem; it explodes itself into a single, overpowering incident; it bears symbolic weight.” Thaisa Frank says that “flash is a kind of seizure of language,” similar to poetry, but that “true flash fiction is different from prose poems because in a prose poem the transformation occurs with an image and in flash usually something happens with a character.” In Frank’s one-hundred-word story “Embroidery,” she accomplishes both: the transformation of an image and a character.

Embroidery

Because I couldn’t find you, I embroidered little houses and visited each one. Some houses floated, tugging on their threads. Others were sewn to their foundations. I opened woven doors, tread on woven floors, until I found you in our old house, playing the piano. We played a duet and made love in the woven bedroom. Each skein was an adventure. Threads the color of flowers. But when we remembered tearing each other’s coats in a city park, we ripped up the house. Thread still clings to my breasts and arms. I play both parts of the duet at once.

The story is constructed through the motif of loss and the act of sewing together a lost world, progressing through stitching and unstitching. The metaphor morphs as a way to reveal the character change, “thread” taking on dual meanings, that of the concrete world and the emotional world. The final image of stray threads still clinging to the character provides such a striking denouement: loss is always threaded to us, always clinging and shaping our songs. To go more deeply into the blurry terrain of prose versus poetry, consider Leesa Cross-Smith’s story (or is it a poem?), “You Should Love the Right Things,” which reads, in its entirety: “Not how it hurts when you press down on a

yellowish-blue, purple-black bruise, but the feeling you get when you lift up. Let go.” When I first read that story, I thought about it all day, as if trying to solve a Zen koan. It’s just a moment, but it’s oh so much more. I see a character grappling with complicated desire. I see a character pushing the boundaries of life in pursuit of meaning and grace. I see how pleasure is never just pleasure. Sure, it could be a poem that’s not all that different from Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” but it’s a story with character change and plot escalation, at least for me, enhanced by that quizzical “Let go.” Flash fiction opens up so many possibilities to use the techniques of poetry for narrative purposes. In “Fuck / Conferences,” Inua Ellams tells a story in a single paragraph made up of a single sentence (although it doesn’t have a period). The story doesn’t have line breaks, but there are slash marks between phrases that function almost like line breaks—the key word there being “almost.” The story reads as a story and a poem at the same time, the slash marks guiding the pace and the breath of the story, drawing attention to moments and images in a way that conventional formatting couldn’t. In “Sanitize,” Maia Paras Evrigenis uses repetition to achieve poetic effects. Each phrase of the story begins with the word sanitize, creating a mood, setting, and story line through the list of items that have to be sanitized after a daughter’s return home from the hospital. Each mention of the word sanitize creates an accumulating force propelled by relentless repetition. The word is allencompassing, demanding, and questioning. Its demands open a delicate and precarious world, a frenzied and worried psychological state—the question of whether things can be sanitized enough, the question of whether the parent can be a good enough caretaker. As a frustrated poet, I was drawn to flash because it allowed me to write toward such nuanced, haunting moments. I could invite indeterminateness into the story and focus on sound, rhythm, image, tone, and allusion in a concentrated way that longer pieces didn’t allow. Author Meg Pokrass actually started writing flash by taking her unpublished poems, removing the line breaks, and converting them into stories. “Often, only minor changes needed to be made. Sometimes, a bit more had to be written. I leaned toward narrative poetry, so clearly this was easier for me than for other kinds of poets. In many ways I feel that with a bit of creative editing, the two forms become interchangeable.”

When I hear prose poets talk about their work, I notice they often refer to themselves as misfits. The same goes for flash-fiction writers, of course. It’s like we’re marooned on an Island of Misfit Toys, waiting to be delivered to a child who will love us. And we know that child exists. We just need Santa Claus (i.e., publishers) to realize the peculiar and particular charm of our misfitness. The blurring of the boundaries is a definition of each form. The short-short and the prose poem are the tomatoes of the literary world. One questions whether they’re a fruit or a vegetable. “The prose poem is the result of two contradictory impulses, prose and poetry, and therefore cannot exist, but it does,” said Charles Simic. Flash fiction embodies a similar contradictory impulse: telling a story by leaving things out. Tyrese L. Coleman is a flash writer who writes with what she calls “this lyrical mashup of poetry and prose.” She discovered the seeds of her voice as she read Jean Toomer’s “Karintha,” admiring how he “begins and ends with a verse, and interrupts a paragraph with a song,” defining his voice not as a single sound but as sounds. She furthered her education in this style by reading Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, an entire novel of short flash pieces written in a lyrical prose style, Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, which all use this style in some variety. Coleman says that writing in such a hybrid style makes it feel “as if someone is speaking to me, or singing to me, or telling me a secret turning me on to this world” because of the modulation of voices, the blurring of lines. “Their style of flash is immediate, creating a verbal impact, a short punch that, when it’s done and read, makes you cock your head to the side and say ‘huh,’ and then lower it to read again and again,” she says. These writers gave her permission to seek her own voice through a combination of fiction, nonfiction, prose, and poetry—to embrace being a “literary mutt.” Russell Edson, the poet and/or fiction writer (most really can’t decide which he is), was attracted to the idea of “a poetry freed from the definition of poetry, and a prose free of the necessities of fiction.” He said a prose poem is like a “castiron aeroplane that can actually fly, mainly because its pilot doesn’t seem to care if it does or not.” As a writer, you mainly have to concern yourself with the flight, not the object you’re flying in. The best definition I’ve heard for a prose poem is that it’s a prose poem if that’s what the writer calls it, just as a flash story is a flash story if that’s what you call

it. You are in charge of the definition of your writing, in other words. One of my favorite exercises when teaching this topic in a flash-fiction class comes from Cornelia Nixon. I have students read Robert Hass’s “A Story About the Body,” which I give them without telling who wrote it. I ask them whether it’s a poem or a story, and almost everyone says it is a story because it’s very narrative, very prosaic, even character-driven in its way. But Hass says it’s a poem, and since he says so, a poem it is. There is no “story detection machine” that will say otherwise. Howard Nemerov explains this nuanced distinction best in his poem, “Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose And Poetry.”

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle That while you watched turned into pieces of snow Riding a gradient invisible From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell. And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

Nemerov could have written about how prose and poetry capture “a moment that you couldn’t tell” in an essay, but he’s writing about the way poetry speaks to mystery, showing how even moments that might be explained scientifically still need to be seen through the lens of enigma. So the question is whether you need classification as a reader. Does the label matter to your reading experience? When we sit down to read a poem, I suppose we set the expectation that we’re going to read more slowly, with more attunement to language and interpretation (and perhaps a dreaded decoding). I’d say that it would be nice to approach prose in the same spirit, though. The

pleasures of prose can go beyond the precincts of poetry.

Flashpoint: Line Breaks

Just as Meg Pokrass did, take a poem and remove the line breaks to make it into a prose piece. If you don’t have a poem of your own, choose one from a favorite poet. Add whatever connective tissue you need in order to make it more of a round, cohesive story. Then go one step farther. Take one of the shorter pieces you’ve written—perhaps the one-hundred-word story or the seven-sentence story from previous exercises in this book—and add line breaks, making your story into more of a poem. Then answer this question: What is the difference between prose and poetry?

CHAPTER 18

How Short Can You Go?

The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it.

—GASTON BACHELARD

I ONCE ASKED THE flash-fiction writer Nancy Stohlman how short the shortest story she’d ever written was. I was expecting an answer of, say, ten or twenty words, but she told me she’d written a story in just one word: “Chlamydia.” She won the prize. When she burst out with “Chlamydia,” it seemed as if a full story had been told because of the utterance of such a powerful word and all of the drama it evoked. It reminded me of Adam Saroyan’s infamous one-word poem from 1965, printed in the middle of a blank page:

lighght

The “word” implies light. The plainness of the word light is no longer so plain, though. It poses a riddle. It begs the question of how to pronounce it, if it’s a typo, or what its intent is. Saroyan was influenced by the Dadaists and the poet Robert Creeley. He was also interested in “concrete” poetry, which focused on the arrangement and presentation of words as much as their meaning. He says

the word becomes sculptural with the extra gh, which allows the ineffability of light to become a more tangible thing. But the presentation of “light” in this case extends its meaning because of its brevity and isolation. “Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn’t. You can see it all at once. It’s instant,” said Saroyan. “What you’re left with is more sensation than thought. The poem doesn’t describe luminosity—the poem is luminosity.” In his collection La mitad del diablo, Juan Pedro Aparicio played with the relationship of the title with the single word it frames in the one-word story “Luis XIV,” which in its entirety reads: “Yo” (“I”). Extreme brevity invites controversy. Many wouldn’t call these single words stories or poems, yet somehow both exist as a poem and a story for me. A oneword story or poem rests almost entirely in the reader’s ability to build a narrative through whatever blend of connotations a word sparks and through the writer’s persona that it speaks to. It’s a story told by the reader, not the writer, in fact. To go from one word to two (doubling the size of the narrative!), I’ve joked that “I am” is the shortest story in the English language. Similar to a one-word story, it’s really more of a prompt for the reader than a true story. The conflict—am, or being—is unresolved. There’s an implied antagonist—existence—but there’s not enough character movement or escalation to call it a story. Except through a reader’s effort. Still. Writing with such extreme brevity is certainly a recalibration of what a story is and how one is supposed to read a short story, but I think one word or “I am” is technically too short unless there is a surrounding context for the words to play in (which is provided by a title like “Luis XIV”). Many posit that the six-word story is the shortest number of words a true story can exist in. The lore of the six-word form is that it was a type of barroom challenge. Legend has it that Hemingway was asked what the shortest story he could write was, and he said he could write a story in six words, and then gave an example: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Some might challenge whether that’s a story or not. I’m generous in such matters because I like stories that open into mysterious possibilities, and I can interpret the story in many ways, each equally valid and meaningful and each a full story. Here is my initial read: A couple has lost a baby, perhaps during labor, and they

have a lone pair of baby shoes that they’d joyfully purchased in the early days of hope and expectation, but now those shoes are reminders of all of the pain they experienced upon losing the baby—in fact, the shoes symbolize the injustice and tragedy of life, so they’re selling the baby’s shoes now in an attempt to release their grief and move on. Except the question lingers: Will they ever be able to truly forget? Will the memory of these new shoes haunt them? Has the loss of the baby changed them as a couple, changed their vision of life and all of its possibilities? The simple six words are amazingly fertile, branching out into all sorts of possibilities, story lines that contain other story lines, layers of nuance, and, yes, character change, for the couple is trying to move through this tragedy to a reconciliation with their life’s circumstance (or perhaps it’s only one member of the couple, the husband, who is selling the shoes, which adds an additional layer of intriguing conflict to the story). When Carmen Maria Machado teaches flash fiction, she always starts with this story because of the seemingly infinite number of interpretations the story can inspire. She says it can be a tragedy, per my interpretation, but it can easily be a comedy if the baby was born with absurdly large feet. She’s heard interpretations that included alien abductions, ghosts, wormholes, parallel universes, infanteating cribs, and a fairy who stole the baby and left a changeling child in its place. The lesson is that a shorter story spawns more possibilities. A six-word story is essentially a prompt for the reader’s imagination—a call to pause and allow yourself to create your story in tandem with the author. Such a short form carries a punch that artfully captures a dramatic moment and a character, such as Abigail Moorhouse’s six-word piece, “Barrister, barista— what’s the diff, Mom?” You can hear the conversation, and especially the voice of the daughter with the single word, diff. You can feel the tension of a child on the brink of adulthood yet keeping one foot in youth. You can feel the arrogance and casual disregard of the daughter and the unheard exasperation of the mother. You can hear the comedy of the moment—and yet sense a greater reckoning to come. And much more. Six-word stories are dashes, yet they contain multitudes. The cofounder of SixWord Memoirs, Larry Smith, calls the stories “ADDeep.” They are deep because of their evocative power, even as they’re fleeting. Consider Joyce Carol Oates’s story “Revenge is living well, without you.” That single well-placed comma

holds such wonderful dramatic suspension before introducing the true dagger of revenge, “without you.” Or there’s the evocativeness of terse fragments covering up intense emotions that guide this story from Sherman Alexie: “My ex-wife. My brother. They eloped.” The six-word form naturally invites a playfulness with language. Usually writers search for vivid verbs to give their sentences more power and force, but grammarian Constance Hale points out in Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing that removing verbs can actually move the story, as in Andy Young’s “Fact-checker by day, liar by night” or Toby Berry’s “Five feet, but in your face.” Both of these stories don’t escalate with the action of a verb but through the descriptive power of their construction. You can visualize Andy Young moving slyly through a bar or Toby Berry lunging like a badger. Each piece uses the pivot of a contrast to carry the action forward. Or, in the case of this six-word memoir, C. C. Keiser moves the story through the energy of the adverbs (and the evocativeness that’s naturally laced into the haiku form):

Unexpectedly, However belatedly, Love came gracefully.

Six-word stories are a good companion to the more philosophically oriented aphorism, which might be the oldest written art form on the planet, dating back to the I Ching five thousand years ago, Greek philosophy, and the Old Testament. The term aphorism is derived from the Greek words apo (from) and horos (boundary or horizon), so an aphorism is something that marks off or sets apart. An aphorism can be anywhere from a few words to a few sentences long, but the ones that are a single, blunt sentence tend to be the better ones in my opinion. An aphorism acquires depth by eliminating breadth. The great aphorist Mark Twain defined an aphorism with an aphorism, defining the form as: “A minimum of sound to a maximum of sense.” Or, as Andrew Hui, the author of A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter, says, “To be aphoristic

about it, an aphorism is simply a short saying that demands interpretation.” The best aphorisms tend to subvert, flipping a maxim on its head, showing off both wisdom and wittiness. Aphorisms depend for their full effect on a verbal artistry that piques thought and startles assumptions. The time it takes you to read an aphorism is shorter than the time it takes you to come to understand it. “Aphorisms are not the warm and fuzzy phrases found in greeting cards. They are much more brusque, confrontational, and subversive. You don’t curl up with a good book of aphorisms; they leap off the page and unfurl inside you,” said James Geary, author of The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism. Through that verbal artistry and their intent to confront and awaken, aphorisms are effective at provoking a deepening of thought, and they find a vital life in activism. Consider how Maya Angelou redefines the verb defeated (and the unspoken subtext of determination) in her statement, “We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated,” or how W. E. B. Du Bois makes us stop to think about the relation between liberty and repression through the contrasts in this quote: “The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.” Both Angelou and Du Bois use contrast as a rhetorical device to heighten meaning similar to Pascal’s play with the word reason in his famous aphorism, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” The technique of a quick and piercing doubling causes one to be more alert, to pause, reread, and reconsider. Friedrich Nietzsche is notable for using the form as a primary way to write and think. In fact, his use of the aphorism was rebellious in the way he used the form to counter the “bigger thinkers” who presented more conventional and complete philosophies. He wrote in Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, “The effectiveness of the incomplete—Just as figures in relief produce so strong an impression on the imagination because they are as it were on the point of stepping out of the wall but have suddenly been brought to a halt, so the relieflike, incomplete presentation of an idea is sometimes more effective than its exhaustive realization: more is left for the beholder to do, he is impelled to continue working on that which appears before him so strongly etched in light and shadow, to think it through to the end.” Nietzsche’s thought moved in leaps of intensity that fit well with the aphoristic form—counter to the way we usually think of philosophy as logical, discursive

argumentation. Hui probed the question of the relationship between philosophical thinking and the aphorism in his book, exploring fragmentary thinking and non-discursive arguments that he calls “atomic thinking” as a method of philosophizing. In fact, an aphorism is often a retort, a riposte, or a dagger in a lazy or flimsy thought. The aphorist challenges platitudes and bromides with bravado, settling thought in unsettling paradoxes. “They tease and prod the lazy assumptions lodged in the reader’s mind; they warn us how insidiously our vices can pass themselves off as virtues; they harp shamelessly on the imperfections and contradictions which we would rather ignore,” says Geary. Hui says aphorisms, because they are designed to spark an internal dialogue, are invitations to philosophy. For example, we have to wonder about the actual role of school and what constitutes a good education when we read Mark Twain’s aphorism, “I never let school interfere with my education.” (Compare that with Confucius’s educational probing, “If I hold up one corner of a problem, and the student cannot come back to me with the other three, I will not attempt to instruct him again,” or Nietzsche’s “What good is a book that does not even carry us beyond all books?”) While aphorisms often carry a veneer of simplicity and read with a flash of insight, they rely on the perfect phrasing and timing of a good joke. Even the shortest of aphorisms turns in an unexpected direction and strikes with a punch line. “Reading a good aphorism is like watching a magic trick: First comes surprise, then comes delight, then you start wondering how the hell the magician did it,” says Geary. Part of the way the magician does it is through the voice of the speaker. The lacing of a speaker’s distinctive voice is part of a good aphorism’s joy and bite— the reason why such vivid personalities as Oscar Wilde were natural aphorists, relishing in their idiosyncratic style and performative inclinations. “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance,” said Oscar Wilde with a narcissistic flare that challenged other supposedly higher forms of love, such as marital or filial love. In a single statement, he placed self above others, above the workings of the world itself, asserting solipsistic pleasure as a goal and philosophy. Aphorists are “troublemakers and iconoclasts, dogmatists whose majestic authority commands consent. They are, by definition, revolutionaries who hold their truths to be self-evident,” says Geary.

The truth is an assertion rather than a proof. It resides in isolation from the surrounding world, without the supporting evidence of an argument or the persuasive rhetoric of an essay, standing “complete in itself like a porcupine,” as Friedrich von Schlegel put it. An aphorism distills an entire philosophy in a sentence. It’s a snowball packed so hard it’s turned to ice. I collected aphorisms when I was younger, writing them down on notecards, as if I were collecting the knowledge of the world, and that’s what aphorisms lend themselves to: a feeling that you can hold and possess knowledge. My collection of aphorisms was made up of little incantations about how to live. That said, many aphorisms have also been diluted through the contemporary “wisdom porn” of Instagram poetry and inspirational quote memes, becoming tired and practically meaningless clichés. Or, they’re also tarnished by being grand bestowals of wisdom by aristocratic “great men.” Sarah Manguso, the author of 300 Arguments, notes that of the approximately five hundred or so writers in The Oxford Book of Aphorisms’ index, there are only fifty women at most. W. H. Auden observed that aphorisms are “essentially an aristocratic genre of writing.” Aphorisms do often carry the tone of an accomplished mansplainer. Manguso’s 300 Arguments presents “arguments” that help recast the aphorism with a bent that is more of a contemporary inquiry, though. Commenting on our very modern (yet timeless) focus on achievement, status, and envy, she writes, “Vocation and ambition are different, but ambition doesn’t know the difference.” That appears alongside, “When I indulge in envy, I envy everyone who has ever achieved anything, even things I achieved fifteen years ago.” That argument is a good complement to her take on social media: “I never joined Facebook because I want to preserve my old longing and also yours.” Rivka Galchen writes about contemporary motherhood in the aphoristically inclined Little Labors: “It’s true what they say, that a baby gives you a reason to live. But also, a baby is a reason that it is not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” Yahia Lababidi calls aphorisms “the poetry of the streets.” In 2008 he published a collection of aphorisms, many gleaned from the streets of his native Egypt, and then he updated and added to them in Signposts to Elsewhere. “Our morality is determined by the level of immorality that we can afford to live with,” he writes. While an aphorism’s structure speaks to a conclusion, as if the final word has been said on the subject, the best aphorists use brevity to provoke thought,

strangely speaking a decisive truth at the same time they open discourse with a question, as Lababidi does in the aphorism above. If our morality is determined by the level of immorality we can tolerate, then what does that say about our immorality, our capacities for denial and rationalization, our shifting needs to do right but also to survive and thrive? How will we be able to identify and recognize our immorality, and what level of contradiction is acceptable? The Zen koan is similarly provocative, but koans tend to use brevity to enhance the quizzical qualities of the riddles they pose. The koan is designed to throw one’s mind off of its usual track and reveal a larger, more capacious awareness. The point of the koan is to exhaust the analytic and egoic mind to reveal a deeper, more intuitive insight. A koan couldn’t be a book or even an essay, because koans are not about arriving at an answer, finding knowledge, or having visions or supernatural experiences. Their aim is for us to see that our fantastic capacities for logic and reason can never provide us with a completely satisfying answer. They point out that reality cannot be captured. So brevity becomes the koan’s frame, the water it swims in. Koans are ambiguous and paradoxical—and brief—as a way to open up the mind. Consider these koans:

When you can do nothing, what can you do?

When the many are reduced to one, to what is the one reduced?

Or, to look at a longer koan:

Not the Wind, Not the Flag

Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said: “The flag is moving.”

The other said: “The wind is moving.” The sixth patriarch happened to be passing by. He told them: “Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving.”

An aphorism strikes, aiming to illuminate in an instance. A koan whispers, hoping to inspire reflection over time, perhaps even a lifetime. A six-word story, because it’s a story, can do either, but without a word more or less.

Flashpoint: Write the Shortest Story Possible

Can you write a story in one word? Three words? Six words? The question invites a reflection on what a story requires. Does it require a beginning, middle, and end? Does it require a character change? What level of suggestion are you comfortable with? Now write the shortest story you can. After you do, ask yourself: Is it a successful story? If yes, why? If not, why not?

CHAPTER 19

The Mot Juste

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

—MARK TWAIN

A POPULAR INTERVIEW QUESTION for writers is, “What is your favorite word?” I often answer “desuetude” because I find a peculiar yet arresting beauty in objects that fall into a state of disuse and decay (a state of deliquescence, you might say, to offer another favorite word in the pantheon of the poetry of decomposition). I also like abeyance because it speaks to the mysteries of things held in suspension, and then I usually throw pamplemousse in there, a French word for grapefruit. I like it just because it’s buoyant, fun, and it reminds me of all of the wonderful newness of a language that you experience in the flush of a first encounter (much like the band Pamplemoose). Everyone has a favorite color, but I’m not sure if many people other than writers have a favorite word. That’s because writers like to think of words with all of the shadings and echoes and tastes they hold. We like to hold them and caress them and rub them between our fingers. We like to intone them, to hear their music, to put them in play with other words, to discover the way they can dance. Yes, it’s erotic. And more. Each time we use a word, we’re connecting with it through a fantastic infinite branching tree. Or fungi might be the better analogy—the way fungal hyphae turn into a mycelial network by branching, then fusing with other hyphae, then branching again, and so on. Life becomes not just a thing but a process, as it is

with words. Words are beyond us, part of something larger than what we can truly fathom, yet they’re also deeply personal. The poet Matthew Zapruder says, “Language has emerged from our collective memory. Over thousands of years, through collective usage and trial and error, we have defined what words do and do not mean. Every time we use a word, we are, unbeknownst to us, reflecting and ratifying and perhaps slightly altering the result of all the decisions about what a word means. Our ‘tree’ is a collective version of everyone’s trees, and my tree is my version of the collective tree.” To use words well is to be able to exist with them in both ways at once—to be able to feel all of a word’s tendrils, to be able to hold it in its original soil, and then at the same time to look at it through your personal history, as if you’re spritzing it with perfume, scenting it with the residue of your experience. When I used to read about Flaubert’s emphasis on finding the mot juste, it always intimidated me. It felt like it was something I was insufficient in. I imagined him pursuing the correct word in a feverish state of obsessive torture. I imagined someone with a stringent, demanding mind that yielded to no compromise. But the mot juste doesn’t have to be so anguished. It’s mainly about attention, effort, and recognition. It entails thinking of words with this dual life: as part of a history of the world in all of its branchings and as part of a deep and ever-swirling part of you, a word floating on the stream of your being, always a thing of itself and a thing being taken elsewhere. Each word is a single note, gaining meaning from the concerto it finds itself in, its resonance never static, never inert. Walter Pater said that poetry aspires to the condition of music. If that’s true, then its more prosaic cousin, flash fiction, must look for the same wellspring. Individual words are the musical notation of brevity. Because you’re working in such a small space, you’re able to focus more on the musicality of not only a sentence, but the musicality of an entire piece. In fact, music matters more in a short-short because the acoustics of a story provide the means to stitch words together in a way that allows them to take root on the page, each syllable speaking among a chorus of syllables. “All writing,” Emerson wrote, “should be selection in order to drop every dead word.” And every dead note.

Flashpoint: Excavating Words

List five favorite words. Write up to five sentences on each word explaining why it’s a favorite word, whether you simply like how it sounds or if there’s a larger personal attachment. Then look up each word in a dictionary, preferably the Oxford English Dictionary so you can read through the permutations of each word’s history. How does the definition influence your view of the word? Is it enhanced or diminished? Then look up five words you don’t know. Write definitions of each word in your own language. Then use each word in a sentence. Bonus points if you can add your favorite words to the sentences.

CHAPTER 20

The Sentence

A sentence has wishes as they decide.

—GERTRUDE STEIN

THE WRITER CHRISTOPHER ALLEN opens his flash-writing workshops with the question, “Which sentence in a flash-length narrative is the most important?” Some students say the first sentence. Some students say the last sentence. Then he tells them it’s a trick question. “It’s every sentence because flash-length narratives don’t allow for spinning wheels and throwaway sentences,” he says. That’s true. The parts that go into making a short are more noticeable because brevity accentuates them, and the part that matters the most might be the sentence. The shorter the story, the more work a sentence has to do. A sentence must be able to cast shadows through the most careful word choice, create mood with the rhythm and juxtaposition of its words, paint brushstrokes of nuance, and capture the microscopic even as it weaves its way into a string quartet of other sentences. In a story as short as one hundred words, a sentence often functions almost like a chapter, carrying forward theme, action, mood, and the special je ne sais quoi necessary for all good writing. Sometimes a single sentence can be a story unto itself (remember the earlier discussion of six-word stories), but those sentences can take on a variety of characteristics, lengths, contours, and rhythms to form the story. The prime example of the practitioner of a “sentence story” is Lydia Davis, who said, “My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a

little narrative in them.” It’s the “little narrative” that she can lace into a sentence so subtly (yet powerfully) that makes Davis’s stories wield such wonderfully enigmatic and arresting effects. Here, for example, is one of Davis’s better-known but least-voluminous works, “A Double Negative”:

At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.

The question: Is such a sliver of a thought a story? To some it might resemble a single somewhat awkward line drawn on a canvas, or an elongated note played on a slide trombone. There is no setting. No characters with names or ages or any kind of detail. And yet there’s a conflict, the choice of whether to have a child, and the contrast between wanting to have a child versus the realization that she doesn’t want “not to have had a child,” and that conflict is pursued over a period of time that reveals a state of mind, implies actions, and yet still holds questions. There’s a finality in her decision, and yet it’s unstable enough that you have to wonder whether she’s truly committed. It’s a muddled sentence, using the double negative to maximum existential and dramatic effect, so muddled that it requires rereading to truly get its meaning. And then, as a reader, you’re stuck in the double negative, which by definition can never be quite a positive, so you’re left in an odd suspension. The character’s resolution seems unstable, and the resolution requires rethinking. It’s a sentence fraught with a private, quiet drama that carries loud subtext. The story is clanging pots in the background, yelling in its way, even though it’s ruminative in nature. It’s a story that we can’t know or hold despite its miniature size. We have to carry it with us and imagine it and live with this character’s double negatives that tick along with her biological clock. We have to wonder how she’ll go about having this child that’s not purely desired, and then what kind of mother she’ll be as a result, and what sort of other parents or guardians there will be for this child. The language of the sentence is the character of the story, for the narrative is a thought. “A sentence is both the opportunity and limit of thought—what we have to think

with, and what we have to think in,” said Wendall Berry. And that is what this story is—“the opportunity and the limit of thought,” a contained unit that allows exploration and expression within its borders. Davis’s stories can seem epigrammatic, yet they’re more than that. She doesn’t rely on any grandiosity of language or elaborate sentence structure. Rather, she constructs the lineaments of her story through subtle phrasal maneuvers, tuning it for different sonic impacts, stitching in the tiniest of narrative threads. Interestingly, Davis’s short “sentence stories” were spawned by her translation of Proust’s long, winding sentences. “I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating Swann’s Way,” she said. “There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn’t want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust’s very long sentences. The sheer length of a thought of his didn’t make me recoil exactly—I loved working on it—but it made me want to see how short a piece of fiction could be that would still have a point to it, and not just be a throwaway joke.” What appears the simplest can be the most profound. When you read Lydia Davis, you’re taken with her precision and attention. Whether she’s writing a story that’s a few sentences or a story that turns into several pages (she’s written only one novel), it all begins with the single moment of a sentence, she says. “A line or a sentence occurs to me, or even just a sentence containing an idea for a story. Or I discover a line or a sentence in something I’m reading, and see how that could be part of a piece of writing of my own. Usually the germ of a story lies in a piece of language that may be funny at the same time that it’s moving, or just odd and unsettling.” In her book Essays One, Davis discusses how sentences from reality taken out of context present wonderful moments of drama. When she constructs a story with such a sentence, she’s wary of how much context to give. “Context can mean explanation, exposition. And too much of it can take away all the interest that the material originally had.” She’s likened the creative process to spying, when you see something in isolation, with intense focus, apart from its normalizing context. When she spots an intriguing idea, she snatches it from the air and goes with it, without thinking of the meaning of the story. For example, she saved this sentence from an email she received: “The children at The Children’s Center are interested in building a castle.” It’s an ordinary

sentence, yet not. She says she was taken by it because of the “repetition of ‘children’ and then the word ‘interested,’ which somehow seems incongruous to the behavior of children.” She compared that sentence to a rewrite that is clearer: “The children at the daycare center want to build a castle out of blocks.” But the better writing removes the quirky drama: There’s not a story in that because its ineffable oddness has been removed—how the children are interested in building a castle, because what children state such an interest in such a way? Although Davis’s sentence stories can come off as ordinary or dashed off, there’s always a twist, a crimp, a swirl, a word combination that makes me realize how orchestrated and deeply considered the sentence is. They work because of her narrative voice, a voice that is prone to overthink, to fret about ordinary moments that reveal larger existential issues. Her sentence-stories seem like answers to a question, and the answers she provides border on incomprehensibility because of the almost nonexistent detail she provides, but they are laced with humor, absurdity, and emotional difficulty in a way that might seem easy to replicate yet isn’t. When I read Davis, I often think of this James Salter quote: “I’m a frotteur, someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible.” A writer uses words like dabs of color. A word is a solid, something firm and palpable. A good writer listens for the peal of the vowels and the sibilance of consonants, identifying the acoustical zones of a sentence and tuning or mistuning the sounds as needed. The acoustics of a sentence play into a paragraph, into the white spaces on the page, into the air itself. That is the way I see Davis: as a frotteur, as one who is constantly rubbing words in her fingers, noticing how they abut each other, how they abrade or how they caress. In his essay, or love letter, rather, on the sentence, “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place,” Gary Lutz discusses “the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, as the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy.” Lutz describes the sentence as “the loneliest place for a writer” because of its “narrow typographical confines,” and he posits that the claustrophobic nature of the sentence can tempt a writer to get out of one sentence and go on to the next, to build a story through sentences that leap forward rather than by burrowing in and exploring a sentence’s contours and sounds. “Too often our habitual and hasty breaking away from one sentence to another results in sentences that remain undeveloped parcels of literary real estate, sentences that do not feel fully

inhabited and settled in by language. So many of the sentences we confront in books and magazines look unfinished and provisional, and start to go to pieces as soon as we gawk at and stare into them. They don’t hold up. Their diction is often not just spare and stark but bare and miserly.” This is true of sentences in short works and long, but a longer work invites the writer to bound forward more, to create a narrative through an accumulation of sentences, of action and reaction, whereas a short work almost requires a writer to do the opposite: to stay with the sentence, to scrutinize it, to rub its words together, to listen for its gongs, its chimes, its drumbeats, its trills, its rumbles. Lutz says that good writers realize

that there needs to be an intimacy between the words, a togetherness that has nothing to do with grammar or syntax but instead has to do with the very shapes and sounds, the forms and contours, of the gathered words. This intimacy is what we mean when we say of a piece of writing that it has a felicity—a fitness, an aptness, a rightness about the phrasing. The words in the sentence must bear some physical and sonic resemblance to each other—the way people and their dogs are said to come to resemble each other, the way children take after their parents, the way pairs and groups of friends evolve their own manner of dress and gesture and speech.

It’s a vast community made up of monks and rabble-rousers, drunks and teetotalers. A sentence can have sweep and circumference, a swing and a lilt. A sentence can be a fillip or a thud, a tickle or a trickle, a brush or a scratch. It can prick or punch or flow or stop. A sentence can be carried by a cadence or a gust of emotion. It can march in a parade or slink into the background. The words of a sentence can pop and flop, slither and dither, hurtle and chortle. Sentences are like people. Some sentences revel in their opulence—they live for the show, fulsome and rococo—while others bristle at any unneeded adornment. And then some sentences seem to know nothing more than their function, as if they’re a garbage disposal or a toaster. Indeed, while Davis’s sentence stories tend to be short and pithy, a sentence story can be winding and rambunctious and breathy as well.

Ted McLoof’s story “Space, Whether, and Why” is told in a single sentence of 1,394 words. The story is not only an achievement of word count but of storytelling. Although such a story might conjure images of a Guinness Book of World Records donut-eating competition—where instead of people cramming donuts in their mouths, the contest consists of authors stuffing words into a sentence—there is nothing extraneous or gorged about McLoof’s story. Every word and comma feels necessary. In fact, I didn’t even realize it was a single sentence until after reading it, and then I traced back through it looking for a period, but there wasn’t one. McLoof said the story is about a lack of space, a momentum that takes over a couple’s relationship with such force that they never get to examine their relationship properly. “Each event piggybacks on the last one, and they never get the benefit of perspective, and that dooms them. I wanted the reader to have that same feeling of breathlessness, of an inability to pause even for the length of a period to reflect, because that’s a distance my characters weren’t allowed.” McLoof’s story shows how strong feeling strides forward, mounding up details and plowing onward with rapacious force. Passion has no time for careful arguments but lives in the breathy, percussive urgency of spontaneity. In Hananah Zaheer’s “Lovebirds,” she uses a long sentence of 703 words to capture the simultaneity of life, how a single moment includes so many crisscrossing story lines that are best represented as fragments flowing into or colliding against each other in a sentence than through neatly organized paragraphs and sentences. Soraya sits at the window on her birthday in a chair her father had made for her wedding. None of her children are there, but she sits watching the driveway, and the past and the present merge as if they coexist, the tray with Soraya’s breakfast the same tray that she carried soup and water to her mother with, the lovebird in the cage the last in the line of lovebirds that have seen the death of parents, the dissolution of a marriage, the tensions of a new wife, the flight of children, all while Soraya holds the lovebird more and more tightly, pondering how everything dies at its most beautiful. In a single winding sentence, Zaheer captures the force of simultaneity, how life isn’t lived in sequence, how one brief moment can contain a lifetime of emotions and memories. Another notable one-sentence story is Donald Barthelme’s seven-page story, “Sentence,” which rambles with such a tumult of words that its unruliness is both expansive and claustrophobic, as if the rhythmic propulsion of words is its

own type of confinement, and then the story ends without a period, in midthought, a never-ending mid-thought. Other flash stories that are long, winding sentences include Kirstin Chen’s “Meine Liebe,” Jennifer Todhunter’s “The Levitation” and Gwen E. Kirby’s “Friday Night.” These stories might be seen as a counterpoint to William Strunk’s position: “When a sentence is made stronger, it usually becomes shorter. Thus, brevity is a by-product of vigor.” Strunk is right, but he doesn’t account for the metaphysics of a sentence, the wishes and decisions of a sentence, as Gertrude Stein put it, the way it can express vigor through an infinite branching of qualifying clauses, through sliding and creeping and sweeping, mirroring thought patterns in the way it darts, changes direction, lingers, catches its breath, zooms in, and then zooms out. Sentences, no matter whether they’re long or short, are units of composition, and how they are used in a story affects how they are experienced in an architectural way, with the space in the room allowing different types of drama. As Lydia Davis puts it, a series of well-organized paragraphs implies that the narrator is organized and in control to a degree, whereas a story that’s one unbroken paragraph implies “more passion and less organization: it can create the illusion that the narrator has launched into this rant or this lecture almost involuntarily and is hardly even aware of it herself. And before she knows it, she’s done—she stops short, she runs out of steam. The single paragraph can be more immediate.” We learn all of this by living in a sentence for a while, inhabiting it as Lutz says good writers do. It’s amazing what can come out of a single unit. “A fundamental way to design narrative is to work with a range within our smallest units, from syllable to word to phrase, clause, and sentence, much as you’d plant a garden with different leaves: pixelated baby’s breath, spike of aloe, palm,” writes Jane Alison. With such a thought, you can walk through your sentences as if walking through a garden.

Flashpoint: A Story in a Single Sentence

“The most revealing story I’ve written is also the shortest,” said Amy Hempel, talking about her sentence story “Memoir.” “Just once in my life—oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?” Now it’s your turn. Write a story in a single sentence. It can be six words or sixty or six hundred. It can be long and winding—breathless—or short and truncated and blunt. A sentence can be viewed much as a story or as a book is viewed. It is a container. It can be a container that is pure and simple, or it can be a container cluttered with strivings and meanderings, adorned with the rubble of meaning. If you want to experiment and see how your story might change at different lengths, write it at all three lengths—six, sixty, and six hundred—and see how the modulations of length change the character of the sentence (and the story). A perfect six-word story might be ruined by an extra fifty-four words (or vice versa).

CHAPTER 21

The Paragraph

Writing is a form of herding. I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.

—LARRY MCMURTRY

IT’S A HUMAN NEED to make shapelessness into a form. In a short-short the paragraph becomes a crucial mode of curvature to work with. The paragraph has a different function in a shorter piece. It doesn’t necessarily serve as a piece of exposition or narration as it does in a longer piece, or at least not in the same way. As a story gets shorter, it enters into more of a poetic atmosphere. The block of the paragraph isn’t just one of many blocks to traverse, as if you’re driving through a never-ending series of city blocks to get somewhere. It’s a block you live on, a block in your neighborhood. It’s part of a pattern, but it becomes separate from the larger pattern when brevity calls it out, isolates it. The simple block of a paragraph constructs a “hereness,” a presence, a rootedness. Let’s go even smaller. The paragraph is a house on a block. You walk into a house, and each sentence is a room in the house, flowing from one to another if the architect has done their job well. A sentence’s style of decoration sets the mood, the pace, the tone. Is it cluttered with knickknacks or spare and clean? Is it a room you move through quickly or take a seat in? Does a door slam, or is it only open a crack? A paragraph can be a spatter of sentences or move with the sinuous grace of a cat. A paragraph can hold cushions or abrasions. It can be pressured or loose, drunk or tight with worry.

A good paragraph is its own type of sensation, its own type of sensuousness. It’s more of an object than a sentence, more complexly structured, yet it holds the same needs for a calibration of sound and rhythm and meaning. Unless a paragraph is filling the rudimentary needs of a story (the pipes and studs of a story), then the sentences that form a paragraph operate like lines in a poem, each answering or not answering the previous sentence, each continuing the flow or diverting it to a mysterious, unexpected place, each sentence a sinew that slithers or sprawls or spirals or scampers or scoots or skips forward. Each sentence refers to its predecessors yet reaches for its offspring (or abandons them in some cases). Each sentence then builds a paragraph, which builds into the next paragraph. Some paragraphs are recalcitrant, of course, like a stubborn child who refuses to move. Others might be rogues, preferring to swerve into an unexpected detour. Each carries varying intensities, and each can have distinct personalities, so you have to decide what register a paragraph’s pitch should reside in. Does your story glide through short paragraphs, which gives an airy, light quality to the story? Or is a paragraph dense and packed, a block of text that is, well, a block. The way you construct a paragraph is a decision of presentation, and that presentation holds its own metaphysics. In the end, what’s crucial is how all words, sentences, and paragraphs exist in between one another, as part of a larger whole and determined by that larger whole, no matter if they wriggle uncomfortably or seek loving embrace. I could give specific examples from stories, I suppose, and deconstruct and diagram paragraphs, but I wonder if that’s the best way to think about paragraphs and write them. Do we write through the logic of assonance and alliteration, tracking long o’s and tallying the seeds of e’s, marveling at how a diphthong adds majesty to the description of a thong? I think good writers don’t overthink it too much. They move through words, sentences, and paragraphs with an intuition seasoned with study, heeding the sounds that form the numinous being of a story with a beautiful and divine intuition that can only be felt, never described. Let a sentence slip. And then go from there.

Flashpoint: A Story in Paragraphs

Write a story in three paragraphs. One way to view this story is to think of it as a story in three acts. You can interpret that in terms of plot however you’d like. For example, the first paragraph might be the beginning, the second the middle, and the third the end. Or you might want to play with narrative form or not have your story be so plot-centric. Either way, think of each paragraph as a distinct storytelling block, so your story becomes a type of tryptic.

CHAPTER 22

The Title

Titles are my biggest bugaboo. For occupying such demure parts of the overall writing real estate, they carry a massive weight.

—YI SHUN LAI

A FLASH TITLE IS different than titles of novels or longer stories. Because a flash story is so short, the title has to do more work. Or, another way to put that is there’s the opportunity for it to do more work. Like all titles, a flash title needs to evoke the story. It needs to do so in a way to make the story stand out. It’s a moment to charm, enchant, seduce, confront, or engage the reader. It establishes a mood and frames the story. But here is one distinguishing feature of a flash title: It can lace its way from the beginning to the end and back again unlike other fictional forms. In fact, one measure of a good title is a title that is redefined by the story and attains more layers of meaning each time we read the story. This can apply to a novel or longer short story, but because of flash’s brevity, there is more of an opportunity for the ending to reach back to the beginning with additional nuance—because of the proximity of the beginning and ending. The biggest hazard of titles is overlooking them. Many a writer titles a story early in the process and then doesn’t truly question the title. The working title unfortunately becomes the title not because it’s good but because of inattention. One way to write a good title: think of the title as an element of evocation, not

description. Suggest, don’t name. The title can be poetic. It can also be ironic and jokey and fun. After you’ve written a title, ask yourself if you’d read a story with that title? Would it draw you in? Michael Martone calls the title of a flash story a “kind of duty-free zone of existence, the realm of untaxable perfume and spirits.” He says that because the words in a title aren’t generally included in the word count. In fact, with 100word stories, we only count the text of a story, so some authors “cheat” by cleverly writing a title that gives them extra room to work within their story. I don’t know why we don’t count the title in 100-word stories. We never discussed it. I don’t remember ever truly thinking about it. I can certainly think of a reasonable, valid reason for the title to be included—it is a crucial part of the story, after all. I suppose the reason not to include it is to emphasize the rules of constraint of the main narrative, just as the title of a poem isn’t included in a poem’s rhyme scheme. A flash story, because of its size, invites an experimentation with the title. Why can’t the title be the first phrase or sentence (as ornery 100-word story writer often try)? Why can’t a title be at the end? Or even the middle? Why can’t a title be the entirety of the story itself? Or why can’t an entire book be a collection of titles? The title sets the stage of whimsicality and existentiality. It announces the story, sometimes attempting to expand it, sometimes just represent it, sometimes to question it. The title is hopefully so distinctive that a reader will remember the story, which is tougher for a flash piece than a novel. I almost never forget the title of a novel I’ve read. I’ve forgotten the titles of many short stories. Make your title unforgettable.

Flashpoint: The Title as Story

Write a title that is longer than the story or where the title is the story itself.

CHAPTER 23

The “Flash Novel” and the Novella

In nearly every era and culture, humans have named the stars and then taken those beloved luminous points and connected them in the sky into shapes and stories. Novellas-in-flash are like those constellations: writers linking their flashes together into a larger image—into narratives deep with possibilities.

—ABIGAIL BECKEL AND KATHLEEN ROONEY, MY VERY END OF THE UNIVERSE

WE’VE TAKEN A STORY down to its shortest possibilities, but the aesthetics of brevity can also stitch together a longer work—even, yes, a novel. The first novel I read that wasn’t really a novel was Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. Although it was shelved with other novels in the bookstore, it is a lesson in the seductive qualities of brevity. It is a wisp of a book, just 128 pages and approximately thirty-two thousand words (while anything more than fifty thousand words can qualify as a novel, novels tend to be in the eighty to one hundred thousand word-count range). The story moves through sensuous impressionistic imagery, moving slowly, moving more through digressions than forward motion. The text is bathed in white space, and since it is a novel about caresses, the prose moves in a similarly erotic fashion. Scenes bloom on the page. The prose is elliptical, spiraling around a fifteen-year-old girl who looks both too old and too young for her age. She’s a woman, yet not. We see her initially on a ferry, wearing a low-cut, red silk dress, a leather belt that belongs to one of her older brothers, gold lamé shoes, and a large, flat-brimmed men’s hat. It’s a novel of the spaces in between—in between ages, races, homelands. It’s a novel of contradictions and the intimacies that find a home in contradictions. It’s

a novel of nascent desire overpowering social strictures. So the spaces, the fissures of text, the repetition of images are the necessary form for the story. The girl in the novel comments on her hat in the initial scene of her ferry ride: “Having got it, this hat that all by itself makes me whole, I wear it all the time. With the shoes it must have been much the same, but after the hat. They contradict the hat, as the hat contradicts the puny body, so they’re right for me.” The conclusion of the ferry ride signals the start of her sexual awakening, as she first glimpses the chauffeured black limousine that belongs to the twenty-sevenyear-old Chinese businessman, the novel’s eponymous lover, who takes her to a secret apartment in Cholon, the Chinese quarter of Saigon. The novel approaches the affair and its consequences from a multitude of angles, toggling between first-person and third-person narration, as if looking at an object in a different light, showing how a single experience ripples into a multitude of experiences over the course of a lifetime. The reader is never on firm ground because the narrator isn’t on firm ground herself. In fact, Duras’s elliptical treatment of her memories places the reader in limbo, never allowing them to fully comprehend the tale being told. It’s as if the narrator is shuffling through old, faded photographs, brushing up against random memories and reliving them for a moment. “The story of my life does not exist. Does not exist. There’s never been any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there.” Her memories play with disembodiment and corporeality. The structure forms itself around image and repetition, producing a hazy dream-like effect, which makes the work feel opaque. After reading The Lover, you’re unable to summarize events; you’re left with a series of images and impressions instead of a whole story. It’s an opaqueness that goes beyond the erotic scenes, where the lover bathes her, dries her, and carries her to the bed. Vietnam, where the story takes place, exists in a foggy steam, its heat and marshes always present, the Mekong River streaming through the novel as if the novel is floating down it. Descriptions are clear and focused and tangible, yet somehow enigmatic, puzzling. “The light falls from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency,” writes Duras, “in torrents of silence and immobility. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue.” The novel has an endless quality, with time circling back on itself, as the stunning opening lines foreshadow: “One day, I was already old, in the entrance

of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, ‘I’ve known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.’” Youth, death, a face that holds the beauty of youth and the ravages of age at the same time. It’s a novel of connections that can only be told through disconnections. It’s a novel of expansiveness that can only be told through the refractions of brevity. It’s a novel that aspires to be a prose poem. I think of Justin Torres’s We the Animals, Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, John Keene’s Annotations, and Sophie van Llewyn’s Bottled Goods. Sometimes they’re called novellas, sometimes they’re called novellas-in-flash. The form, generally defined as being between fifteen thousand and forty thousand words, consists of individual flash pieces that could sometimes stand on their own and that morph together to form an overall longer narrative. The form is similar to the novel told in linked stories, except that it uses flash instead of conventional short stories. It’s the best of both worlds: a reader can get the longer immersive experience a novel offers while still seeing the world through the refractory lens of tiny narrative fragments. Somehow, the two aesthetics combine. “The novella-in-flash is valuable because it does something that other forms don’t do, allowing the author to build a world that is compact but complex simultaneously,” wrote Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney in My Very End of the Universe, a collection of novellas-in-flash. “Often novellas-in-flash have a staccato feeling because of their numerous breaks: their plentiful starts and endings and the way that many of the individual stories stop short of where a chapter in a traditional novel or a longer story would conclude. Other novellasin-flash can have a dreamy effect, dropping the reader into situations they can’t remember walking into and shifting them to new situations before they may feel done with the old ones.” Ian McEwan, in “Some Notes on the Novella,” calls the novella “the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who’s a genius on his best days).” The giant is the novel, of course, who is granted the privilege of being unruly yet revered as a genius at the same time—perhaps because of “his” bigness (yes, note McEwan’s gendered characterization), not in spite of it. We like bigness in America. The heft of a book attests to its profundity, its depth, its force (and perhaps its manliness). The novel gets its vaunted status perhaps

because literature has been in quest of providing the most mimetic version of life possible, so this would seem to require an allness of allness, a grand harvest of details, a tallying of stories, but we have to pause and question this aim. Charles Baxter asks, “What if length, great length, is a convention not always necessary to the materials but dictated by an author’s taste or will, a convention that runs parallel to expansionism, empire-building, and the contemplation of the heroic individual? It may simply be evidence of the writer’s interest in domination.” Shorter forms don’t flex their muscles and assert their prominence in such a way. I wonder if the novella isn’t the beautiful daughter of the rambling genius of a novel, as McEwan says, but is instead the beautiful daughter of the short story? What if it’s not seen as a shorter, less-developed novel—less rambling, less muscular, less macho—but seen in the context of an entirely different language, the language of brevity? Actually, what if it’s not a child of either the novel or the short story, but a form unto itself, a sibling of each? What if its techniques, the materials of its construction, are centered in the tension between brevity and expansion, making it more than a hybrid but something entirely unique? What if it possesses its own kind of genius? Like flash fiction, the novella is a form that requires concision and compression while simultaneously opening itself toward a larger, more expansive idea. Judith Leibowitz says that whereas the novel expands its themes—in reading it, you can feel its terrain shifting, you can live in its looseness, its messiness, its polyphony, its ragged ends—the novella focuses in on its themes, creating a “double effect of intensity and expansion.” She says, “The novella is eminently a narrative of suggestion…. The action in a novella does not give the effect of continuous progression, of a large area being covered as in the novel, but of a limited area being explored intensively.” It’s the notion of “suggestion” and the lack of “continuous progression” that are important to me in an aesthetics of brevity. The novella manipulates scope, offering a refined and dense narrative that feels much larger in scale than it is, in part, as Leibowitz says, because the action in a novella is often compressed through the means of a repetitive structure. In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner says the novella “moves through a series of small epiphanies or secondary climaxes,” which reminds me of Irving Howe’s

definition of short-shorts being epiphanies ripped from their contexts or Nathalie Sarraute’s tropisms where stories pivot on small, barely perceptible changes. The poet Randall Jarrell defined the novel as “a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it,” but a novella, because of its brevity, seeks to get it right. A novella pirouettes where a novel lunges. A novella rests where a novel runs. A novella listens where a novel talks. As Gardner says, the novella has “a focus that leads itself to neat cut-offs, framing,” whereas a novel can be entranced by its sprawl. A novel asserts the premise that it knows the truth—that is the promise of its form, its heft—whereas a novella resides in a more ambiguous, partial state. “If flash fetishizes the moment, the novella-in-flash provides a space for myriad moments to coexist, rub up against, and reverberate off of one another,” says Aaron Teel. “If flash is allergic to exposition and summary—if it revels in language and detail and scene—then the novella-in-flash allows the details to accumulate and the images to grow and twist and repeat.” McEwan questions why the novella isn’t given its proper due, existing always as a smaller planet in the shadow of the larger novel, especially since the form of the novella often spawns better writing. He says that in a novella, “the demands of economy push writers to polish their sentences to precision and clarity, to bring off their effects with unusual intensity, to remain focused on the point of their creation and drive it forward with functional single-mindedness, and to end it with a mind to its unity. They don’t ramble or preach, they spare us their quintuple subplots and swollen midsections.” Novelists tend to write long (and often longer than they should), McEwan says, because “they are slaves to the giant, instead of masters of the form.” They are also sometimes slaves to marketing forces and money, unfortunately. Big sells better than small in the United States. A novella has traditionally been seen as inherently less desirable than a novel because of its slenderness. It’s as if it’s a dish in a restaurant that a consumer might send back because the portion size is too small. As if it’s a meal that can’t possibly sate an appetite. Many a novelist has beefed up a novella, like a high school student adding words to meet the required length of a research paper, in order for it to be called a novel and have a better shot at selling. The novella doesn’t qualify for its own category at any book-awards ceremony. People still talk about the “Great American Novel.”

No one has ever talked about the “Great American Novella” (or should it be recast as the “great american novella”). In his afterword to Different Seasons, his collection of four novellas, Stephen King said that as an accomplished novelist he could “publish his laundry list if he wanted to,” but he couldn’t find a taker to publish his novellas individually. “I couldn’t publish these tales because they were too long to be short and too short to be really long,” he lamented. King said the short story and novel are like two respected nations sharing a vast, ill-defined, and sordid border region. “At some point, the writer wakes up with alarm and realizes that he’s come or is coming to a really terrible place,” King says, “an anarchy-ridden literary banana republic called the ‘novella.’” Works of brevity tend to become odd pariahs in American literary forms— always lesser, somehow insufficient—but many writers also write a novella not as a story that was unable to reach a greater word count, but as a novella, with the principles of brevity in mind, with the form guiding the writing and the writing guiding the form. In fact, because a novella is so undefined, so without strictures and expectations, it invites constant redefinition. It is a protean form that is always moving, always evolving. Brevity, instead of discouraging such shape-shifting, encourages it. Because it’s not quite one thing or another. It’s a combination. Yet it’s its own thing. “If you ask an artist who creates crazy quilts how they come up with their designs, that artist will likely tell you that each finished project originates from an emotional place,” said Meg Pokrass. “Each quilt is different because it is made of many found scraps and pieces of cloth in different sizes with no regular color or pattern—the sleeves of an old work shirt, perhaps, or the skirt of a wedding dress. Similarly, the writing of a novella-in-flash involves working with flash fiction fragments and stories by linking them together to form a layered, narrative arc. Working in both art forms demands an improvisational spirit regarding the creation of both content and structure. A novella-in-flash writer and a crazy quilt artist both become familiar with navigating incompletion and juxtaposition.” Incompletion. Juxtaposition. Different types of fabrics stitched together into a

whole. Format is a performance. A performance of extravagance or simplicity. A performance of weightiness or lightness. A performance of expansiveness or constraint. The novella is a performance in humility, openness, lightness. It lays no claim to knowing the whole truth, and therein its beauty lies. “If you don’t know the whole truth, you might as well keep whatever you have to say short. You might as well puncture the pretense of sheer size,” said Charles Baxter. As John Keene writes in Annotations, a collection of short récits by unnamed narrators about growing up Black in St. Louis, his novel is “a series of mere lifenotes aspiring to the condition of annotations.” The book’s structure, its poemlike compression, its exploration of racial, economic, and sexual identity from many angles, is a signpost to look to the margins for the story of the whole.

Flashpoint: Exploring the Novella

Read some novellas, and after you finish them, consider how it would be a different work if the novella was turned into a longer conventional novel. What if your writing group or teacher or agent or editor made this suggestion—to make it longer so that it would fit better into the definition of a novel and be more marketable? Would the work gain in profundity? What would it lose? Please note: some of the books below are categorized as novels, but I think that’s a marketing consideration, not a definition of story form.

I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying, Matthew Salesses The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros Annotations, John Keene Liliane’s Balcony: A Novella of Fallingwater, Kelcey Parker All the Day’s Sad Stories, Tina May Hall

Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell Mr. Palomar, Italo Calvino We the Animals, Justin Torres Petrol, Martina Evans Cataclysm Baby, Matt Bell Dept. of Speculation, Jenny Offill My Very End of the Universe: Five Novellas-in-Flash and a Study of the Form, Chris Bower, Margaret Patton Chapman, Tiff Holland, Meg Pokrass, and Aaron Teel Superman on the Roof, Lex Williford

CHAPTER 24

Endings

The ending says, there is nothing else that I can do to keep you, and so—despite the heaviness and utter heartbreak that you may feel—I leave you with such a small message, such a small sorrow, such a small sound. That is what an ending should do.

—JENNY BOULLY

HOW TO END? In such a short form, I always say you’ve got to nail the ending like a gymnast. If you waver, tip, or fall, you’ll ruin everything you’ve previously achieved. It’s akin to the punch line of a joke: one extra word, one extra pause, and the punch line doesn’t work quite as well. The rhythm has to be perfect. But there are so many different ways to define how to nail the ending. “The end of THE END is the best place to begin THE END, because if you read THE END from the beginning of the beginning of THE END to the end of the end of THE END, you will arrive at the end,” wrote Lemony Snicket in The End. Spoken like a novelist. A novelist who perhaps doesn’t want to end, or really can’t locate the end, as Italo Calvino describes an ending in The Baron in the Trees:

That mesh of leaves and twigs of fork and froth, minute and endless, with the sky glimpsed only in sudden specks and splinters, perhaps it was only there so that my brother could pass through it with his tomtit’s thread, was embroidered on nothing, like this thread of ink which I have let run on for page after page, swarming with cancellations, corrections, doodles, blots and gaps, bursting at times into clear big berries, coagulating at others into piles of tiny starry seeds, then twisting away, forking off, surrounding buds of phrases with frameworks of leaves and clouds, then interweaving again, and so running on and on and on until it splutters and bursts into a last senseless cluster of words, ideas, dreams, and so ends.”

As strange as it is to say, stories often resist endings, or writers create at the end while trying to locate the ending. An ending sometimes seems to result as an act of “cowardice or fatigue, an expedient disguised as an aesthetic choice or, worse, a moral commentary on the finitude of life,” as Michael Chabon writes in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Or, as Frank Herbert said, “It’s just the place where you stop the story.” The worst ending, at least for me, is one that forces a twist upon the story—a supposedly clever paradox, an odd coincidence that fails to illuminate or truly reveal anything. Is simple surprise the goal of an ending? If that’s the case, then the story whose purpose is the punch line or twist at the end functions like someone flicking off your cap as you walk down the hallway. I suppose such endings are spawned by the idea that an ending must hold a dramatic reversal, which has always seemed overrated to me. I see too many writers ruin their stories with such overreaching when a subtle reversal, a nuanced recognition is preferable. Charles Baxter advises writers to pursue a discovery at the end that is an “emergent precious thing.” Perhaps poets know more about endings. “The love of form is a love of endings,” wrote the poet Louise Glück, and, indeed, since writing a short-short places the writer in a keen attunement with form—rather than the rambling spirals that a novel might have—the ending becomes more palpable, more pronounced, more of a key and deciding ingredient. Poetry also is keenly tuned

to an ending that relies on association. One reason to study haiku is because of the associative leap that tends to happen between the second and third line. That leap travels through the ending, an unfinished breath. David Shields thinks an ending should provide “retrospective redefinition,” like the couplet at the end of a sonnet that turns the poem in a new direction—it should make the reader view the story they have just read in a new light that requires them to think of it differently. A short-short’s ending is different than a longer work’s because it can be grasped as a whole, in a moment, so it resonates differently. I was once told that the best way to end a story is to end it two paragraphs earlier, so I always look at my endings and see how they read if a substantial chunk of them is taken away. It’s interesting how in the attempt to write a good ending, we keep going further, writing more. I find it’s as true as any writing advice I’ve ever received. George Saunders says he once defined the ending as “stopping without sucking.” His premise was that a writer should charm and interest the reader throughout the story, so the story is continually escalating until the very end. “If, at one such moment, we stop, we at least can say that we didn’t bore anybody,” said Saunders. I like the writer Jayne Anne Phillips’s definition for the ending of a short-short. She said that the last lines of a short-short “should create a silence, a white space in which the reader breathes. The story enters that breath, and continues.”

Flashpoint: Endings

Take one of your stories and see how the resonance of the ending changes if you end it a couple of paragraphs earlier. What can you gain by suggestion, by indeterminacy? Think of Valeria Luiselli’s take on endings: “The end of things, the real end, is never a neat turn of the screw, never a door that is suddenly shut, but more like an atmospheric change, clouds that slowly gather—more a whimper than a

bang.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This acknowledgments section was supposed to be brief. Its lack of brevity isn’t due to my lack of writing discipline but because there are so many people to thank—too many to actually thank in this space, because writing flash fiction has gone far beyond a genre of storytelling for me: it’s woven itself into the fabric of my life, tying me to writers around the world who have nourished my thoughts and my soul with their stories, their insights, and their companionship. I wish I could write thank-you notes to each of them. I mentioned in the introduction how Paul Strohm introduced me to the onehundred-word form, and I’ll forever be thankful to him because his introduction guided me to a wonderful new creative path that led to what can best be described as an overwhelming addiction. Fortunately, that addiction found a healthy outlet, especially in teaming with Lynn Mundell and Beret Olsen to create 100 Word Story in 2011. 100 Word Story started as a whim but is now a lifetime project. And more. It’s like a little sailboat that takes us to different flash-fiction lands where we meet new, exciting writers. It’s a place of constant discovery and renewal, so I’m especially appreciative of Lynn and Beret’s creative energy, their discernment, their generosity, their humor, their care, and their taste (including their feedback on this cover). Such traits have welcomed all the people who have submitted their stories to us and who have read 100 Word Story. Many of those writers became friends whom I was fortunate to host at the longrunning Flash Fiction Collective reading series in San Francisco, which also began as a whim with the very whimsical Jane Ciabattari, Kirstin Chen, and Meg Pokrass. It’s become a ribald and rollicking series that ushered in many flashfiction stories and books and became its own little institution for little stories in the Bay Area. To publish a literary journal is to enter a community of other publications and journals, and I’ve been deeply influenced by the conversations I’ve had with others’ thoughts and stories over the years. There are several that are bedrocks for me. I remember when I first pulled Sudden Fiction from a bookstore’s shelf in the late ’80s—the first of an ongoing series of flash-fiction anthologies edited

by James Thomas and Robert Shapard (joined later by other coeditors). That anthology planted a seed of storytelling in my mind, and that seed grew thanks to the nourishment of publications like the Rose Metal Press field guide series, especially their Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction (edited by Tara L. Masih), which led me down many a new trail of writing. Tara went on to found the Best Small Fictions annual series, which I turned to for several of the stories referenced in this book. I’m also a student of the annual Best Microfiction series, founded by Meg Pokrass, and I look forward to Wigleaf’s annual “best of” flash list a little bit like a kid looks forward to Christmas. I can’t name all of the flashfiction books I’ve read, but I want to spotlight Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction and Short-Form Creative Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, both of which informed this book. I also highly recommend Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative and the entirety of Graywolf’s “The Art Of” series (which originally inspired this book). When we founded 100 Word Story, the internet felt like it held everything possible, that every niche was filled. It turned out that wasn’t true, because hundreds of flash journals have sprouted up to form an expanding online flash universe. While writing this book, I often thought of it as an ongoing conversation with authors and publications in that universe, and I drew on so many for this book. I’m an avid reader of SmokeLong Quarterly (perhaps the Paris Review of flash journals) and Dinty W. Moore’s Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. I also learned so much from interviews and stories in publications I quoted from in this book, including Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Wigleaf, CRAFT—Literary, Jacket2, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Passages North, Fiction Advocate, Cleaver Magazine, Jellyfish Review, Okay Donkey, Cincinnati Review, jmww, Cutleaf, Big Other, New Flash Fiction Review, Necessary Fiction, Monkeybicycle, Pithead Chapel, DIAGRAM, flashfiction.net, Electric Literature, Flash Frontier, The Short Story, Midwest Gothic, Indiana Review, 14 Hills, and Creative Nonfiction. And I keep making new friends: I’m thankful that writing this book introduced me to Gordon Square Review, This is your real name (Otago University Press), The Volta, Wildness, Pidgeonholes, Kahini, Vela, The Writer’s Center, and Threadcount. And then it’s nice to see how Poets and Writers, The Writer, and Writer’s Digest publish regular articles on flash fiction—and that there are now Substack newsletters dedicated to it, such as Kathy Fish’s The Art of Flash Fiction. The writing of this book was anything but “flash-like.” It began years ago and took different forms, so I’m grateful that one of those forms spoke to Laura

Mazer, who helped shape and sell it to the fine folks at the University of New Mexico Press, where it was taken care of by Elise McHugh, Stephen Hull, James Ayers, Anna Zumbahlen, and then Felicia Cedillos, who patiently and masterfully designed this artful cover. At the beginning of each of our Flash Fiction Collective readings, Jane always asks the question, “What is flash fiction?” The answers have always varied in surprising ways. A pinprick. A one-night stand. The pop of a bottle of champagne. My answer was this book—but the answer really goes further than this book. It’s really the constellation of flash-fiction authors and publications that continue to answer the question in different ways every day.

POSTSCRIPT

As a preacher of renunciation, I have not learned to practice what I preach.

—PESSOA

There’s always something to add, isn’t there? One more final word after the previous final word (forgetting the final word that came before that). Or at least most of us have more to say, so brevity doesn’t necessarily come naturally. But I’ve said enough, haven’t I? If I keep talking, I’ll ruin the whole thing. You have to trust an ending. If you distrust it, that’s when you add a lot of the “more,” as if bringing out a cake at a dinner party when people have just savored a crème brûlée.

ONE MORE POSTSCRIPT

Brevity requires more discipline and practice than you can possibly imagine. We’re humans, so we tend to always want to add more. I’ll stop there. Seriously.

FLASHINGS

Quotes on Writing Short

In the spirit of brevity, sometimes a single quote can offer as much or more than an entire chapter on a topic. A collection of quotes is like a collection of shortshorts, in a way. You can read them and move in and out of conversations, hearing snippets instead of the whole but filling in the gaps with your own thoughts. In that spirit, I want to share these favorite quotes.

On the Definition of Flash Fiction

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.

—KATHY FISH

On Compression

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.

—W. TODD KANEKO

On the Elasticity of Time

You can think about time in ways that you can’t think about it as easily in a longer story because you’re forced to be very condensed. It can be a year. It can be a single moment. Or it could be generations. But that’s my favorite kind of flash, the kind that crosses an entire civilization or entire lifetime. It shows you how one sentence can just click into another and they have to work very, very hard over and over again, to do that, to show them the evolution of a character and I think it is magical.

—VENITA BLACKBURN

On Unearthing Stories

The power of micro is that it is telegraphic and telepathic, in the same place at the same time, where the space is small and time is short. Confused? Write it down to figure it out, like with a poem. It is compression without compromise. Compulsion okay. Get in and get out, if you can. Let the silence speak. You’ve heard it all before: theories on invention and serendipity, urgency that can lead to epiphany—don’t think, think—with language flying all over the place. It’s hard work. Some people talk about tricks, clever ways to get there. I only know that the good stuff comes from someplace underground and grows organically. The

really good stuff that surfaces is hard to find, like black truffles and albino asparagus and morel mushrooms.

—JAMES THOMAS

On Plot

Reality is multiple and infinite—to organize it by cause and effect is to reduce it to a slice.

—JULIO CORTÁZAR

Life is but a history of moments. Life does not contain plots.

—PHILIP STEVICK

While in a novel every conflict is expected to be tied up by the end, flash fiction revels in undoing those knots, leaving the ends open and frayed.

—JOYCE CHONG

This genre is not excused from plot.

—KIM CHINQUEE

On Characterization

One of the great pleasures of writing flash fiction for me is not knowing so much about my characters. Oftentimes with longer stories, I spend so much time writing and thinking outside the story that by the time I’m done with the story, I feel like I’ve written a novel or two or that I could have, what with all the material I developed and how well I know those characters’ lives. Flash fiction is kind of the opposite. There are exceptions to this for sure, but much of the time I don’t know a whole lot about the characters’ lives outside of the small world of the story. I embrace mystery and, well, ignorance to some extent. I take instinct’s outstretched hand, and I don’t ask so many questions about where we’re going.

—MICHELLE ROSS

On the Mot Juste

Of course the justness of a word sometimes resides in the precise degree of discomfort it inflicts.

—TIM ROBINSON

If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams—the

more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.

—ROBERT SOUTHEY

On the Reader

A writer of short fiction has to trust the reader to get the point the first time around, has to trust that if she does it right, there’s no need for excessive elaboration, and no need to beat the reader over the head with the point.

—AMINA GAUTIER

On Empty Spaces

When one is writing with so few words, there are many “empty spaces.” Spaces a reader can fill selectively—a Rorschach, as you say, perhaps. There is a quote I like a lot, and I think applies here, by Andrew Wyeth: “I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn’t show.” Often with very brief works of fiction the reader “imagines” what might lie beyond those narrow borders.

—ROBERT SCOTELLERO

On Patterns

We find beauty … in the pattern of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.

—JUN’ICHIRŌ TANIZAKI

On Hostility to the Flash Form

I’ve encountered a lot of hostility toward flash fiction over the years. Flash is like an immigrant trying to find a new home in an academic country that sees it as an outsider. That wariness is slowly changing. I think we have many anthologies that illuminate the art of flash, and many respected literary authors who are helping to make the genre more accepted. It’s not a gimmick, as some claim, it’s just compressed prose that has been around for centuries. A cousin, if you will, of poetry.

—TARA L. MASIH

My response to denigrations of flash fiction has always been simple: if you think it’s so easy to write, I dare you to give it a try.

—TOM HAZUKA

On Selling Flash Fiction

The market urges writers to think bigger, act bolder, be more ambitious. But flash doesn’t care a whit about the market. It’s a middle finger to our whole system of capitalism, its demands and imperatives. There is no such thing as a commercial flash fiction writer. No Thomas Kinkade or Michael Bay. We don’t do this work for remuneration. (Partly because there is none.) We do it to be accomplices to beauty, to produce pieces that aren’t mediated by the latest taste or trend. I’m talking art in the margins. In the recesses. In the tiniest of cracks.

—RAVI MANGLA

On the Power of Suggestion

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.

—DIANE ARBUS

On Collage

Narrative collage is a technique that allows the writer to recreate a world shattered, and perhaps senseless, and certainly strange. Time no longer courses in a great and widening stream, a stream upon which the narrative consciousness floats, passing fixed landmarks in an orderly progression, and growing in wisdom. Instead, time is a flattened landscape, a land of unlinked lakes seen from the air.

—ANNIE DILLARD

The artist confronts chaos. The whole thing of art is, how do you organize chaos?

—ROMARE BEARDEN

On Heft and Lightness

A good short-short is short but not small, light but not slight.

—KU LING

In a flash narrative, there often isn’t space to take on every element of fiction, so a tiny story might be fat with poeticism, fat with character, fat with setting, fat with symbols, but not fat with all of them. Flash fictions offer us depth over breadth. Fat with substance, as playwright August Wilson used to describe his plays. Fat with substance, even while being made of less substance.

—RION AMILCAR SCOTT

Short stories are fueled by epiphanies and epiphanies are, by their very nature, fleeting.

—AMINA GAUTIER

On Changes in the Writing Process

I was in the West Village recently, with an hour to spare, and sat over coffee in a café. Ordinarily I might have been reading. But instead I pulled out a pen and grabbed a flyer nearby and started writing on the back of it, and within that hour I had a draft that surprised me. I had no intention of writing about the subject I chose. Convergence of time, place, and a bit of information—I’d just walked past a recording studio founded by Jimi Hendrix and still active today, didn’t realize I was going to write about it. I wrote another flash story on the subway (I got a seat for once). Something about the sparks that fly when the train comes down the tracks and Siri on my iPhone converged. Flash pulls out the sensual, the painful, the joyous, the whimsical. It makes writing new work possible when I’m overwhelmed with deadlines.

—JANE CIABATTARI

On the Power of Omission

The more the marble wastes, the more the statue grows.

—MICHELANGELO

Design isn’t crafting a beautiful textured button with breathtaking animation. It’s figuring out if there’s a way to get rid of the button altogether.

—EDWARD TUFTE

Wringing language dry, I force excess from early drafts. This might mean leaving something bare, just the skeleton of elements. Or it might mean the sound of dripping, the sense of something lightening, trailing off, expressing, weeping.

—CAROL GUESS

On Momentariness

I view longer short stories as time funneled through a narrative one is relating to a reader—a longer story is what we tell people, shaping the experiences and chaos of life into a narrative arc. A short-short, to me, is more akin to how we actually experience life—in unique, resonant moments, in very focused explorations of image or time.

—KAREN BENDER

On Length

Somehow it is the story idea itself that decides. When I get an idea for a flash story, it almost always comes as a fully complete story idea—except for the words, the language, to tell the story. If I get an idea for a longer story, I usually

know how the story begins—but not how it continues and never how it ends. Somehow the language and the story elements themselves contrive to take me there. I’ve never started a flash story that turned into a longer story. Nor have I started a long story and realized it should be much shorter than I imagined.

—PAMELA PAINTER

On Genre

Because of the brevity of 100-word stories, the reader doesn’t typically expect every single story that you write to fall into a particular genre. The form itself becomes the genre.

—RAN WALKER

On Writing in the Margins

Flash gives voice to stories in the margins, the ones deemed too slight or elusive for more conventional narrative modes. And the deeper I get into the practice of writing, the more I am drawn to this interstitial space: between sense and scene, snapshot and story, silence and sound. By illuminating the underseen, we reveal a world more fully realized, in which small gestures resemble events, and a single moment can carry the weight of years.

—RAVI MANGLA

A work of art cannot help but exist from within the artist’s perspective, and an artist who creates from a marginalized location cannot help but embed this vantage point into the angles, rhythms, and textures of their art.

—JENNIFER S. CHENG

I submit that women are better at flash fiction because they have learned to speak large in the smallest spaces. They have learned to be heard through the cracks; to be brief because that moment is all they’ll get; to make the most powerful case, the most powerful art, in the seconds between the men and their doorstop novels. I submit that women have learned how to make small fictions because they have had to, and like everything women writers do, they have turned a “small” form into an art and started a fire in the world.

—AMBER SPARKS

On Expansion

When I write long, I usually take every opportunity to expand on the story, to diverge from the primary narrative and delve into a character’s past, but when I write flash fiction I don’t do that. I avoid that detour. I pass that rest stop. With flash fiction, I always keep an eye on my mileage so I can make the trip as beautiful and efficient as possible. So my advice would be to pay attention to your writing habits and identify those places where you would naturally expand on a narrative. Once you’re conscious of that, then you can choose when and where you do it.

—RUTH JOFFRE

A novel is just a story that hasn’t yet discovered a way to be brief.

—GEORGE SAUNDERS

On Editing

I don’t think I learned how to write remotely well, until I started writing flash. Before having a word limit, I had what I call a real case of the hi-hellos-what’s ups, my lines would be really repetitive. It would take me 15 pages to tell a 7page story. Writing flash gave me the most important skill I think an aspiring writer can have: learn how to be your own relentless editor.

—MEGAN GIDDINGS

On More Metaphors for Flash

A short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

—LORRIE MOORE

Short fiction seems more targeted—hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it’s a lot smokier and less defined.

—PAOLO BACIGALUPI

If flash were a food item, it would be a bouillon cube.

—KIM MAGOWAN

On Cupcakes versus Cakes (One More Metaphor)

Flash fiction is the cupcake of literature. And it’s a totally different experience than a 3-layer wedding cake. Yes, they both have plot, character, story, poetry. But for me, the gift is in the intention. I love cakes and cupcakes, but I love them differently and for different reasons, and they require different visions and skills. Yes, we could produce gallons of batter and pour it into big sheet pans, and that is glorious. But we can also focus, shrink, and condense a tiny bit of our creative batter into a perfect circle, the delicate precision of a story you can hold in the palm of your hand.

—NANCY STOHLMAN

On Revision (and Knitting)

When knitting, you might get pretty far along with your sock before you realized you effed up and dropped a stitch. If you want your sock to look good, you are going to rip out the stitches and lose the hours you spent knitting perfectly well after you made that mistake in order to correct your error and ultimately make the sock you were born to knit. For me, writing is the same. If I take a wrong turn, I need to go back to that juncture to fix the story. Otherwise, I will have a sock, I mean, story, that has not lived up to its potential. A stupid, useless sockstory.

—LYNN MUNDELL

On Time

In a world where we all feel pressed for time, flash allows readers and writers to experiment without inhibition. We can try a new author/voice/form, and concentrate entirely on that one thing, without fretting over “losing” the time we’re dedicating to it. If someone who doesn’t think they have time to read a whole novel still carves out time for flash fiction, that’s a good thing.

—TARA CAMPBELL

On Flash and Flexibility

I feel like flash fiction’s advantage is that it’s so flexible. Some of it’s very narrative focused, the language largely a vehicle to reveal the story’s structure. Others seem to lack narrative almost entirely, and are constructed on the language level. It’s all fair game, and given how diverse Asian America is as a demographic population, this flexibility might allow us to see a lot of writing we

otherwise wouldn’t.

—JEFFERSON LEE

On Discernment

Only through the heat of writing, and then the work of revising and revising can anyone gain the cutting-edge of discernment.

—LU CHI

On Constraints

The imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.

—JONAH LEHRER

On Detail

To learn about pine trees, go to the pine tree; to learn of the bamboo, study bamboo.

—MATSUO BASHŌ

On Style

Style is the difference between a circle and the way you draw it.

—PABLO PICASSO

On Hybrid Forms

I’ve always been drawn to hybrid forms, but I didn’t think of them as hybrid until I had to describe my writing to someone else. To say “hybrid” means that you accept genre classifications and other people’s designations. I don’t. I also don’t walk around thinking of myself as hyphenated. I’m just me. Some of us don’t fit in the lines someone else drew.

—SEJAL SHAH

On Clarity

Extreme clarity is a mystery.

—MAHMOUD DARWISH

On Metaphors

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

—WALLACE STEVENS

On Essence

I think writing itself is, from the start, distillation. When I write, I’m trying to distill how I need to say a thing down to the fewest and most necessary words.

—CARL PHILLIPS

On Fragments

A book that is made up of fragments…. There is white space, therefore. Ghosts coming and going, adding and subtracting, rearranging the air.

—JOHN D’AGATA

On Taking Risks

Shorter work can take an alternative approach without having to worry as much about tiring readers out or pushing them away. We, as readers, may be more willing to see it through to the end, even if we’re still making sense of the conceit at the halfway point. You can’t always say the same for a longer work.

—TUCKER LEIGHTY-PHILLIPS

On Momentum

Flash fiction demands velocity, a spiraling forward, metered out in tension, either through character actions or heightened diction. A serious play of words or images creating this flash of a moment(s), this crystallized insight into character, setting, life, before it burns away. For a moment, this resonance, it’s insidious for the reader, lurking, cauterizing, cracking, healing. It’s the firework burst imprinted on the retina, the lingering cataract.

—TOMMY DEAN

On Characterizing Different Writing Forms

A novel, a micro, and a poem go to a bar together. What happens? The novel won’t shut up, so the micro and poem go into the bathroom and start making out.

—ROBERT VAUGHAN

On Endings

—You know what question really drives me insane … and it happens every goddamned time: “How do you know when it’s finished?” —Well, sometimes it’s hard to tell … —She’s talking about a Jackson Pollock we saw at a gallery. —Yeah. Why not three splatters less, or two more? —That’s what makes Pollock Pollock, right? He can just stare at it and say: “That’s it. It’s complete. It’s finished.” That’s what makes you an artist.

—BILLIONS, SEASON 5, EPISODE 7

APPENDIX

Gleanings from The Art of Brevity

Even God knows the story can’t be told in its entirety. A profligacy of words soon disorients. Rococo flourishes end as fulsome decadence. It is absence that spawns the fundamental mystery of life. Subtle gestures, dashing glances, unspoken words whisper through our days, a beguiling puzzle. No explanations, please. Listing a dish’s ingredients reduces its taste. Keen images pique the palate best. We drift, rush, falter, and flounce, following scents. A flicker of light appears, a thunderclap in the distance. Illumination, short-lived, then gone, or so it seems. We can only touch nuances and wonder. And then, that final breath.