What they talk about when they talk about "Flash Fiction": Focus, theme, narrative
This is Jazz writing. I'm a software engineer aspiring to be a literary author. I discovered that a mixture of structure and creativity works best for me in my writing journey. In this newsletter, I share my breakdowns, readings, listings, and anything in between and beyond to accompany you and me in our unique, adventurous writing journey.
This week, I'll focus on "flash fiction." It's a curious little part of the literature, don't you think? It's like one day, somebody just got up and thought: "How few words do you need to tell a story?"
For me, short and flash fiction is easier to approach. You lose the opportunity to elaborate on the characters' inner thoughts and the ups and downs of the plot, but you focus on the story itself. Your job is to tell an atomic story, a chapter of life.
This week, I read 3 flash fiction pieces published in The New Yorker:
I explored three questions:
- What was the tangible focus of the story?
- What was the theme of the story?
- How was it narrated?
Focus
A "place" seems like a popular choice for flash fiction focus. You might not have the word budget to include more than a scene, so why not design a spectacular scene and make the story about it?
The first story from Haruki Murakami is about a home in an area called "The Triangle Zone":
The Triangle Zone we lived in was much narrower, more like a wedge. Imagine, say, a round, full-sized cheesecake. Cut it into twelve equal pieces with a knife so it’s like the face of a clock. [...] That tapered end of the thin slice of cake? That’s exactly the shape of the Triangle Zone I’m talking about.
[...]
Railroad lines ran along either side of the Triangle Zone, one a national railway line, the other a private line. [...] Whenever I gazed at the trains whizzing by at the tip of the Triangle Zone, I felt as if I were standing on the bridge of a destroyer slicing its way through the ocean waves.
The second story by Hebe Uhart is about the experience of teaching in an elite preparatory school. The focus seems to be shared between the vocation and the place:
It was not only time that seemed frozen; the school did, too. Something had sucked the air out of that place: at school functions, students did not breathe, and the teachers’ lounge featured enormous portraits of illustrious rectors, plus a gigantic one of a major naval battle. The teachers’ lounge was dark, as were the courtyards, and in those places I would sense disapproving looks aimed in my direction.
The third story by Stuart Dybek wanders around in the streets of Chicago. This story is divided into two scenes, focused on different streets with different people.
Uncle Romy told me that, if he hadn’t grown up on the inner-city street named Blue Island, he probably would never have dropped out of high school to join the Navy. Blue Island was within walking distance of the Ashland Avenue bridge, which spanned the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. [...] He never tired of seeing the street split open as the bridge lifted its asphalt arms to the sky. He loved watching the rusty barges, heaped with demolished cars, floating by on river time, while street traffic waited, jammed bumper to bumper. At night, eruptions of acetylene-blue sparks and furnaces flaring behind charred foundry windows coated the oily water with visions of hellfire.
The second scene happens in a different part of the city with a different companion:
But we have wandered into a part of the city where neither of us has been before, even though it feels familiar. There’s a saline smell of pilings that you might expect in a maritime city like New Orleans, but not in Chicago.
Theme
"Flash fiction" is so short that you need to be clear and transparent about the purpose of your story. That doesn't mean that it needs a message or some grand resolution. But what is it about actually? A state of life? A relationship? Some feelings? That's the theme of flash fiction for me.
In the first story, "My Cheesecake-Shaped Poverty," the theme is "poverty," as the clever name suggests. The triangle zone is so appalling that no one wants to talk about it:
People there didn’t seem to want to talk about this Triangle Zone, or even think about it. For them, it was like talking about a wart behind your ear. Better left undiscussed.
[...]
We picked this place to live in for one simple reason: it was dirt cheap.[...] We’d only recently got married, and, not to brag or anything, but we could very well have been featured in the Guinness Book of Records under “World’s Poorest Couple.”
The narrator shares with us how people regarded the house:
“Yeah, cheap it is. For sure,” the bald real-estate agent said. “But I have to warn you—it’s really noisy. As long as you can stand that, you could call it a lucky find.”
“Would you mind showing it to us?” I asked.
“Sure. But can’t the two of you just go? I get a headache every time I go to that place.”
[...]
When the friend who helped us move took one look at our new dwelling, hemmed in by railroad lines, he was aghast. After we’d unloaded everything, he turned to me and said something, but a passing express train drowned out his words.“Did you say something?” I asked.
“People really live in a place like this, huh?” he commented, impressed.
In the second story, "The Preparatory School" we delve into school life and the cultural differences:
There was surely a modern methodology for teaching Latin, but that place prevented me from making any plans. I would go in terrified and feel calm again only once I was at least two blocks away. I felt that everything I did was wrong; my fear was a kind of animal fear, and I was just relieved that they didn’t beat me or lock me inside.
The school has always been a nest for fledgling leaders, dissidents, and success stories, but, at thirteen and fourteen years old, those kids were punished for any little thing; a security guard, who was said to work for the police, did not allow them to go to the bathroom during classroom hours, no exceptions. Those were the conditions I had to work in, and teaching Latin no less.
The narrator talks about their relationship with the students:
What might “cinnabar” be? The students were going to fuck with me by asking, but neither I nor they actually wanted to know. Having made a fool of myself, I would leave the school still not knowing such things, and if, as I expected, some punishment were to be inflicted upon me, at least I would know the reason.
In the third story, "Blue Island," the theme is connection. We read about the relationship between Uncle Romy and the narrator in the first part:
Romy wasn’t my godfather, but, given that we’d grown up in different generations in the same neighborhood, and were both southpaw welterweights, he appointed himself my guardian angel. That required him to teach me to box, or at least to try, which he did until I was able to convince him that getting repeatedly hit in the mouth was ruining my embouchure for the clarinet.
He also advised me in matters of the heart.
"Matters of the heart" is what the rest of the story is about. After reading a dialogue about how to ask out a girl with Uncle Romy, we head out to the second part, where the narrator is walking in the city on a date:
The bridge crosses into blocks of deserted streets grooved by railroad tracks and lined with shuttered warehouses. We stop in front of what looks to be an abandoned factory with a “for rent” sign taped to the door.
“Can you imagine what living here would be like?” I ask.
“Let’s go in and see.”
Just like the progress of the first part of the story, we continue with a dialogue between the two characters for the rest of the story. We see that the role of dialogue in this flash fiction is more prominent than the other ones, given the theme of "connection" and "relationships."
Narrative
A common ground that I noticed between these three stories is that they're "memories" mostly. This proves to be a great technique for telling a story about an extended period of time without going into detail about the environment, characters, and events. After all, memory is intermittent and fragile in nature.
In the first story, we find out that we hear from the memory in the first lines:
And she and I lived there, on that land. This was back in 1973 or ’74.
The ending of the story beautifully wraps up this memory. Although most of the story is about the hardship of living in the triangle zone, the final memory of the story is a joyful one. I remembered this section from the "Bird by Bird" on why stories (novels in its context) need hope nevertheless:
Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don’t need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries, and this is a form of winning. Although as my friend Jane points out, if you or I had been there speaking really bad French, they would have turned us in in a hot second—bank on it. In general, though, there’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.
Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird (Canons) (p. 69). Canongate Books. Kindle Edition.
The second story also utilizes narrating from memory. The main character talks about the general vibe of the school, the colleagues, and the students and then lands on a certain memory:
Since I taught Latin class from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., I would lighten the mood by teaching Roman culture in the second hour and describing what the Romans ate.
Just like the first story, this one finishes with a peaceful setting where the narrator is free from work pressure.
The third story is all about nostalgia and connections, so memories play a more important role. The first part is called "Let’s Walk," the character reminisces on a memory with Uncle Romy:
His advice for getting back with a girl you couldn’t forget was to call her out of the blue. Timing was important. It had to be in the evening, but early enough that you hadn’t lost the light. When she answered—if she answered—you’d say, “Let’s go walking.”
The second part is called "Factory Windows" where the narrator and his date bond over a poem, a shared experience of their city:
“Remember that old anthology of Chicago poets we used to page through for something to read at slams, Sandburg’s ‘the fog comes on little cat feet,’ Brooks’s ‘We Real Cool’? There was one by Vachel Lindsay about factory windows.”
“ ‘Factory windows are always broken,’ ” she says, reciting.
What's unique about the third story is that it comes down to a certain memory, a certain scene, and fully explores it with a lengthy dialogue, unlike the other two stories where the closing scenes were still some fleeting memory.
Reading and analyzing these three stories taught me much about writing flash fiction. I can summarise my learning like this:
Start by laying the groundwork for something central and tangible for the story. A place can be a good option. Use memories to review different story stages to keep the story short. Be clear about the purpose of your story. Finish up with a glimmer of hope.
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