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."#3969•
Chapter 1
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.#3959•
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.#3950•
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.#3962•
Chapter 3
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?#3978•
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."#3975•
Chapter 4
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."#3976•
"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#3972•
Chapter 5
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."#3974•
Chapter 6
"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.#3977•
Chapter 8
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.#3996•
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."#3991•
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.#3989•
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.#3986•
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."#3988•
Plot is a statement about reality, a commentary on how life is lived.#3994•
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.#3997•
Chapter 11
"Every something is an echo of nothing," said Cage.#3987•
Chapter 19
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).#6530•
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.#6532•
Chapter 20
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.#6531•
Chapter 24
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.#6529•