Flash Fiction: Exploring The Unconscious Through Stories In Miniature
“The rhythmic form of the short-short story is often more temperamentally akin to poetry than to conventional prose, which generally opens out to dramatize experience and evoke emotion; in the smallest, tightest spaces, experience can only be suggested.” – Joyce Carol Oates
In my first year as a Creative Writing student, one of our lecturers shared with us a very short story by Leonora Carrington called ‘White Rabbits’. I was simply astonished by how a tale told in only a little over a thousand words had left such a mark on me. Fast forward a year and I took the innovative unit on my course, taught by an experimental poet, and he properly introduced me to the genre of flash fiction. As previously mentioned on our platform, a flash fiction story, also known as a short-short story or sudden fiction can be anything between 1 - 3 pages or 250 - 1,000 words (or sometimes up to 1,500 or even 2,000). Despite their length, these little stories hold incredible power and are able to create a strong effect through their brevity and impactful prose.
A Powerful Form Of Writing
To treat flash fiction with the importance it deserves, first we have to acknowledge that the myth of short-short stories being a product of social media and our busy climate is untrue. Flash has been explored for more than a century by people who’ve appreciated this form of storytelling that requires careful attention to prose and spareness. In the introduction to The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, Tara L. Masih talks about the evolution of short-short fiction starting with the early 20th century. Some precursors of this genre are Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, Rabindranath Tagore, Yasunari Kabawata, and August Strindberg. This shows that people experimented with really short stories before the distractions of our modern world, out of interest and not necessity. Contemporary writers such as Jayne Anne Phillips, Lydia Davis, Jamaica Kincaid, and Brian Evenson, to name only a few, continue to bring their contributions to the flash fiction genre.
Defining the structure of a flash fiction isn’t straightforward, but is not impossible. According to Masih, ‘a flash is simply a story in miniature, a work of art carved on a grain of rice - something of import to the artist or writer that is confined and reduced, either by design or outcome, with the purpose of creating an intense, emotional impact.’ Robert Shapard and James Thomas, who, in 1986, published together an anthology of flash fiction stories called Sudden Fiction, which resurrected the form, have a pretty accurate take on this genre: ‘flash fictions are highly compressed, highly charged, insidious, protean, sudden, alarming, tantalizing. They confer form on small corners of chaos, can do in a page what a novel does in two hundred.’
Flash Stories Are Stories
It’s easy to confuse flash fiction with poetry and prose poetry, or with vignettes which are rather slice-of-life literary sequences than stand-alone stories. But take these following stories as examples: ‘The Hen’ by Clarice Lispector and ‘The Well’ by Veronica Stigger. They are both sparse in length, yet are clearly finished stories. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The end in both cases is powerful and leaves the reader astonished because of the subtle yet sudden change of events. Something else particularly captivating about these two stories is their prose - it’s clear that each word and sentence has been carefully chosen and is there because it adds something to the story. Such a short format doesn’t leave room for ornate descriptions and character development, yet as readers we are still transported to those worlds and left thinking about the symbolism of the stories.
Exploring The Unconscious Through Stories In Miniature
Last Christmas, I got as a gift a debut short-short story collection by Sue Harper, ‘The Dark Nest’- you can read her stories on her website. Harper says her work of fiction is ‘about hidden or repressed phenomena’ - she describes these stories as ‘body gothic’ and says that they took her by surprise. I like how she characterizes them as being ‘full of the uncanny, the unknown, the violent’ because I believe flash fictions have this remarkable capacity to amaze us, both as writers and readers of them.
Writing flash stories isn’t easier because of their brevity. The form requires close attention to detail, great constriction, and strong imagery. A good flash story surprises the reader and can have an almost dream-like characteristic to it. In order to create striking images, we have to explore what the unconscious has to offer. Pamelyn Casto in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide defines the best flash fiction as ‘short short stories that manage to reveal the hidden, accentuate the subtle, and highlight the seemingly insignificant.’ However, if you’re a beginner in the genre, there is no need to pressure yourself to come up with extraordinary ideas. Most of the really short stories that have stayed with me have the most basic of concepts - they are stories about simple and overlooked moments, changed by sudden and unexpected events, which have left me thinking deeply about their significance.
