Strategies + prompts in flash fiction.
Quick notebook dump for writers seeking craft tips on flash fiction. Most of these strategies and prompts come from my peers—and from anthologies. Particularly, I want to focus on Albert Mobilia’s description of storytelling in Brooklyn Rail 2 Anthology, where he describes the said the nature of storytelling as "dilating the moment just before into an hour, a day, or twenty years." Disguises are the stories we tell about ourselves.
"History is an earthquake,” Mobilia writes. “Remembering is the construction that takes place afterward."
A few flash prompts & strategies
Create a setting as character or protagonist. You see this most commonly in eco-fiction or stories about the elderly in which a house seems to have more personality than its residents. Make a list of sensory impressions which convey the feel of this setting. Add verbs and cut adjectives. Empower or disempower the setting by degrees of immersiveness. Your childhood bedroom, the backseat of a car where things happened, a truckbed, a church entryway, a secret hide-out in the woods, etc.
Tell a story about an ordinary event from the perspective of an animal. A cockroach who crawled into grandma's coffin and gets shut inside. A puppy who watches a father molest his daughter. A dragonfly on a pipe bomb.
Write a story in all dialogue. Let the speech acts convey a sense of motion. Two friends burying a body. A couple deciding how to tell their family that they aren't going to get married in the morning. A badminton game conversation which reveals something between the characters. An ordinary interaction on a bus which turns into an act of violence. A flashback.
Build contrast into voice by writing a fiction in alternate stanzas, taking a "They say" paragraph and contrasting it with personal experience of narrator. "They" becomes a character somehow.
Grace Paley: "Write a story, a first-person narrative in the voice of someone with whom you’re in conflict. Someone who disturbs you, worries you, someone you don’t understand. Use a situation you don’t understand."
Make use of flash-forward, or prolepsis, a literary device in which the plot goes ahead of time i.e. a scene that interrupts and takes the narrative forward in time from the current time in a story.
Write a flash advanced through scavenger hunt.
Grace Paley: “You might try your father and mother for a starter. You’ve seen them so closely that they ought to be absolutely mysterious. What’s kept them together these thirty years? Or why is your father’s second wife no better than his first? If, before you sit down with paper and pencil to deal with them, it all comes suddenly clear and you find yourself mumbling, Of course, he’s a sadist and she’s a masochist, and you think you have the answer — drop the subject.”
Write a flash advanced by pedometer, footsteps each day.
Write a flash advanced through detention notices.
Write a flash advanced through train stations along the coast of country you wanted to visit. Or along the coast you have visited.
Write a flash advanced though French words learned on 7th grade of dad's sabbatical. Mechant. En guille. Petass. Leche moi.
Write an instruction booklet or a self-help pamphlet.
Use conduplicatio, or using the same word again and again, as a tool to build motion and texture.
Parataxis is when all of your sentences carry the same weight. They usually have very few clauses, and more importantly, none of the clauses are subordinated to one another. We use subordinated clauses to indicate what the most important part of a sentence is (the most important part is in the independent clause), so when there is no subordinate part, it makes every part of the sentence seem equally important. The effect is flat, declarative, and often somewhat bleak-sounding. Hemingway made this style famous.
Hypotaxis is when clauses in sentences are subordinated to one another. This makes it clear what we should be focusing on, and therefore also can give an emotional cast to the writing. It points clearly at what is important and what should be read with the most weight. Think Jane Austen.
Write a flash that advances through song lyrics, even something as banal as Happy Birthday.
Write a flash that advances through the dance steps of a traditional dance. Look for a traditional folk dance which enables you to play with imagery from another time and place.
Stuart Dybek: Rich memory from childhood—-a priming description—-shift gear to second character and dialogue. This shift makes a story.
Memory sharpens before lying—-or confessing love—-everything signifies. Write a flash which exhibits or makes use of this.
Poet Mary Ruefle says "the sentimental" links an object to a feeling. Make a list of sentimental objects and map them.
Experiment with Reader/Protagonist close third person point of view. An example is Amy Hassinger's "Sympathetic Creatures".
A few notes on revisions and tips in flash
These suggestions are entirely subjective—-they depend on the taste and style of the writer. Some are what might be called “workshop dicta,” so I want to acknowledge this before sharing them. In many ways, these tips may be more helpful in understanding what contemporary literary mags look for (and how they evaluate flash submissions) rather than what good writing involves.
Cut your intermediary actions. Use simple dialogue tags since they tend to be the most invisible and inobtrusive. "Say" and "ask" are your friends.
Sherrie Fleck: "Don't complicate your verb tense" in flash. No "very". No "soon". No past tense. The men drink their coffee black.
Make use of direct address transitions to advance plot or build tension.
Seek an aggressive editor.
Value nouns and verbs over adverbs and adjectives.
Value consonants over vowels, and hard consonants (k) over soft consonants (g).
Value one-syllable words over 2 or 2 syllable words.
Apply Gordon Lish's dicta that each sentence should include more stressed syllables than non-stressed syllables. And a sentence with a masculine ending (stressed syllable) will sound stronger than a sentence with a feminine ending (unstressed syllable).
Avoid using the word "was" and replace it with the right action verb.
Matt Salesses: Avoid introductory clauses (Closing my eyes, I smiled.) except when used as time and location markers (i.e. When I got back from the store, At ten, In the disco, etc.).
Avoid "begin" or "start" intermediary actions (i.e. I began to sing. He started walking. He got up from the couch). Just write the active verb (i.e. I sing. He walked. He went to the door.)
Value consonance and assonance over alliteration.
Use indirect speech for voice. Direct speech for drama. Indirect for information. Indirect for things like "The car is that way" which should be "She pointed him to the car" or "She sighed and pointed to the car" or "She walked to the car instead of answering". (per Matt Salesses)
Look for spaces where you are telling right after or before showing something. Are you explaining what you mean right after saying it better and more directly?
Jennifer Pieroni: Greatest villain in flash is the word package or the cliched image. "All of the sudden" or starting with weather. Use a thesaurus to alter these in final edits.
Rusty Barnes (editor of Night Train): Takes flash 1,000-1,750. Detail more important than plot. "A kind of short story that uses traffic signs as narrative signposts..." Picky about comma splices and paired -em dashes.
Elmore Leonard: Never open a story with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people.
Avoid use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.”
Eliminate the split infinitive, as “to calmly glide.”
Again—knowing the rules of the game is what makes it meaningful when you break them. I value rule-breaking in fiction and life. As a result, I study the rules very, very closely in order to learn from them.
I also study the way writers I adore break the rules.
Here is what Bradley Babendir so brilliantly culled from Joy Williams’ flash in his essay, “The Godmother of Flash Fiction” (Paris Review):
In one story, Williams writes, “She spent most of her time in the company of people like herself who said they knew what they were thinking. For instance, she thinks any penis is ugly.” What makes this distinctive, ironically, are the extra words. These are not people who say what they are thinking or know what they are thinking, but say that they know what they are thinking. Williams often uses dashes where they seem grammatically incorrect or descriptions that appear redundant. But, on second read, what might have seemed extraneous is in fact crucial.
The most distinctive characteristic of Williams’s writing is, to steal a word from Italo Calvino, exactitude. This idea is distinct from specificity or precision or other near synonyms. A great deal of her work relies on obscurity. She often leaves ambiguous things that might be considered essential to a story—the genders of the characters, how they relate to one another, where or when it’s taking place—and instead focuses on whatever very narrow idea or feeling she is trying to convey….The sentiment is exactingly rendered, though the language refuses to resolve itself into precision.
Language that “refuses to resolve itself into precision” marks the reader’s mind. This tension between “exactitude,” specificity, and irresolution is part of what makes Williams’ writing irresistible.