Lately, while working with writers on revising their flash fiction, I’ve noticed a lot of stories that start with or quickly become a recounting of a memory from the main character’s point of view. Memories in flash are difficult to pull off as the central narrative because they often don’t feel immediate enough. They lack urgency as a veneer or a screen in front of the story, keeping the reader at a large distance from the events of the story. This distancing can be used to great effect when applied with intent, but often this reverse to memory is a way for the writer to get into writing the first draft of their flash. It’s a form of scaffolding that the writer needed, but it doesn’t help the reader to experience the story.
I often recommend getting rid of the veneer of memory and just use the events as the front story. Memories often work better as a ribbon of backfill, a line or two to add context rather than establishing a character in a murky or undeveloped setting telling us about an event that happened in their past. Memories that just spring from the narrator don’t feel as immediate as when they are happening in a static space of the narrator’s mind. We see this structure used a lot in movies and novels, where the distance is part of the story occasion or part of the story themes, but flash, in its urgency, can reject this type of narrative distance.
But here, I want to give evidence of a story that does use this veneer of memory to great effect. In fact, the story, its structure, and its form depend on this memory. So let’s look at “Sarah” by Peter Orner.
The thrill of murdering her mother’s plants. It comes back to her while pushing her baby daughter’s wicker carriage down Everett Street. Something about the wind and the shadows of the trees and the frightening radio reports makes her think of her father’s doom.
The first line isn’t actually an action, but a feeling masked as one. A bit of trickery that makes us pay attention. An insidious way to transition to this memory. Notice that we do get a bit of the stage for this memory to take place as the character is pushing a baby in a carriage down a specific street. The baby here in the front story is important, the whole reason for the recounting of the memory, so we have something to hold onto as we drift into the murky space of the main character’s memory.
And this memory has importance because it deals with her father’s “doom.” This is a great escalation so early in this story. Adding another character adds more tension. So if you can’t start with an action, consider a call back to when the character committed a dynamic action. And a memory of a deep desire. This character is still reckoning with the event she is about to recount through her memory!
She was twelve, and her father was smothered under piles of blankets on his deathbed, except that he wouldn’t die. And nothing could convince her that her mother hadn’t put him there.
Exposition, sure, but it’s weighted with context. Now we know why this memory is important to the character as she is pushing her baby in the carriage. It’s something she can’t let go of, something she’s trying to figure out. Obsessions create characters!
So she’d stomped across the house and yanked up all the plants by their roots, and run outside, tearing at her own hair as if it too were a plant.
Such a smooth move to get us back into action, to make the memory come alive, to take center stage in this story. I love how it reminds us of the opening line, and how it gets us back to her feelings of excitement and rage. Orner eschews the move toward creating a new paragraph, wanting us to know that this is all flowing from the memory, that the moments in this scene of memory won’t/can’t be separated. Form and structure challenge us to stay in this moment with this character.
“She’s always been an hysterical girl. It’s been known to happen in this town, you know.” And the doctor sipped his tea and laughed, but held off saying anything out loud about Lizzie Borden in a house so full of death already.
Even here, our main character, Sarah, is static, is eavesdropping, and her character is revealed by the perspective of another character, an adult making an off-hand joke. Another kind of escalation, even though our main character isn’t doing anything. Do we believe the girl has the ability to kill? Is the connection with a famous girl killer enough to convince us?
But the idea made Sarah smile, too, standing in the long brown grass beneath the open kitchen window, listening. The idea of wielding that famous ax was not all that unappealing.
Here the allusion to Lizzie Borden doesn’t reveal Sarah’s character through counterpointing, but rather by connecting the two, making Sarah unique and specific through this connection rather than the disconnection.
Hadn’t Uncle Solly told her that when he was a boy he delivered newspapers to Lizzie herself’s door at Maplecroft, and that she always gave him dimes and pats on the head, even if she did do it? And everybody knows she did it, Uncle Solly said. So you could still be good after doing something like that. If she did it, she promised herself, she’d spare her baby brother.
Most stories couldn’t take the chance of adding an additional memory, but Orner digs deeper because Sarah is a character made up of and from memories. That is who she is! This, of course, isn’t just any memory either. It adds more context to the connection with Lizzie Borden and gives us a statement of one of the story’s themes. That all people have good in them even if they have done something bad, something unforgivable. That sin and goodness are all relative. Sarah’s wrestling on two plains, the front story, and the memory story, with forgiving her mother, with rather she should still blame her for her father’s illness.
“He isn’t dead yet, Azariah,” her mother answered the doctor.
Just an excellent use of dialogue to get us back to the active memory scene. It creates a whitespace that helps us jump from this other memory back to the main memory.
And she remembers not hearing what the doctor said back, because she was already running, running down the cobbled streets, barefoot, stubbing her toes, hating her mother, arid at the same time knowing how right she was— that no, he wasn’t dead yet, that he was g0ing to linger in that bed with that goat, the maid, Lillian, sponging his head for- ever, and she’d never be free to blame her finally and absolutely for doing it to him, for al] those years of haranguing that drove him upstairs to bed for good. Her father retreated, skulked away from living; he didn’t flee.
Sarah bursts back into the story here, taking it back from her mother, reasserting her blame of her mother, and Sarah’s desire to escape it all. This is all memory, but it’s so active. Another escalation. She’s now out of control. Juxtapose that with the reader’s memory that Sarah is calmly walking down a street pushing her baby. Sarah can think and feel, but she’s going to do it while she’s running away, each visual, urging her to leave. And we end on this note of counterpointing her and her father. Her father didn’t leave. He took it, and now he’s sick. We can infer that Sarah thinks running away is the only way to avoid this sickness.
Now she looks at her own daughter, her Rhoda, bonneted, curled up, huddled in blankets, one foot sticking out over the edge of the carriage. One little leather shoe. Walt made such a game about shining her shoes with spit and polish. A daughter of mine’s gotta look her best gorgeous!
Just a great use of white space to get us back to the front story. The prosaic walking of her baby. Nothing wrong. The care “Walt” (her husband?) takes with her shoes. There is no fleeing for this child, which is such a subtle counterpoint to Sarah’s relationship with her mother in the memory! There’s power in the interweaving of front and back stories here. Orner takes a risk, hoping that you’re still invested so that he can bring this baby back into the story one last time at the end.
Again she sees herself sprinting across these bleak streets, and out of muddy puddles. Her bleeding feet numb. There was a war on, just as there’s one brewing now, and she remembers thinking then she’d just as soon all the soldiers die, if father had to die. Because, though she knew nothing of what men do after they fight wars, she could see them coming home already, alive, those marching men she saw from atop her father’s shoulders, to flowers and songs. She could hear her mother praise them. And her father will still be upstairs, not dead but dead, and she’ll still be a girl who’s lost everything.
Back to the memory, but she’s still running, fleeing, and then a dead stop into a summary of what was taking place, but with great visuals, connecting her, her mother, her father, and a raging war. The unfairness of death and living. Another dip into her desires. She is naive but fierce in her love for her father. Nothing outside her family can help her, and we’re thinking about where she and her family stand now in the front story?
She wanted to be the one, not her father, to rub her sores and rub her sores and rub her sores. It should be her in that bed wrangling, kicking off the covers (he was always either too hot or too cold), wheezing like an exhausted horse, rubbing. The one with Lupuserythematosus.
This memory is all about her desires during this event, how she wanted to replace her father either for his own sake or for the attention she fiercely wants, we’re not sure. Probably both, and we can identify with this need, this want. And so, while in another story, this might feel like abstract feelings, Orner provides the details to anchor us to the concrete world, a veneer stripped from memory by her naked vulnerability. But how has this affected her in the here and now? We’re going to find out in this last paragraph.
A mother now, a wife now, but the streets will always be the same. Farragut. Gardner’s Neck. Weetamoe. Massasoit. Wampanoag. Running, toes bleeding. She could never get far enough away. The baby shakes the bonnet. off in her sleep. Her father died. The soldiers came home. Her mother still won’t look at her baby.
Well, all that fleeing, all that desiring and wishing, and she didn’t get very far. All these streets and there’s no adventure, no help for what happened in the past. Her father still dead, those soldiers home and healthy, the baby ignored by her mother. The rift that started when Sarah was twelve continues today. And notice all of the context, the depth, and urgency are provided and created by the memory, and nothing in the front story except for this void between daughter and mother. All implied by our experience of the memory, the backstory taking up more importance and space than the front story!
If using memory in flash, make it urgent and visual; stage the scene and let us see the characters act and react to each other. Allow it to create context and depth, to put pressure on the characters in the front story. Understanding/misunderstanding the past is often a key to understanding a reckoning or change in the future.
Prompt: Find a story that you’ve started with a memory. Try to make the memory scene as active as possible, with characters in a particular setting with specific details illuminating this space! Find places where you can weave in the memory scene and also the front story scene, so they juxtapose in a dramatic, narrative way! In the ending, show us how the past/memory has put pressure on the main character to act or change in the front story! How can the memory be made into an urgent context for our character in the future?