Against Hiding Information in Flash Fiction

Creating tension through context

Aug 08, 2025

One trope I often see in beginning flash writers is the desire to withhold information from the reader. I find this kind of structure disingenuous, even if I acknowledge that it stems from a tradition of genre writing or pulpy mysteries of the past. There are also plenty of puzzle box-type mystery shows on TV right now. I’ve even enjoyed a few of them, but I’m a reader who prefers the tension of the story to come from my knowledge, from my understanding of the context surrounding the primary conflict of the narrative, especially in flash or micro where the canvas/word count is so truncated.

This frustration with abstraction, with murky writing posing as mystery, could come from my own impatience, knowing I’ll never read all of the stories and books I want to read in this lifetime, and that stumbling in the dark of a story, even one under four hundred words, has me reaching for the next story. And the argument could be made that I’m not the perfect reader for these types of stories. If so, then what stories am I an ideal reader?

In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders says, “A work of art moves us by being honest, and that honesty is apparent in its language and its form and in its resistance to concealment.” But even if we don’t want art, don’t want “honesty,” we do want our readers to submerge themselves in our stories, to move past our artifice. And one way to do that is to increase the tension not through concealment, but through heightened context. It’s hard to root for a cipher. Characters who have clear and specific motivations usually make us keener to follow them through their trials.

Each writer has their own purpose for writing each of their stories, and sometimes the goal/the hoped-for thrill for the reader is for this sense of being lost without a map. Frustration might be expected, might be a part of the story occasion, may make the story meaningful, and for some readers, there’s a joy in trusting the writer and the narrative to deliver them somewhere new and mysterious.

As Rust Hills says in Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular, “The trouble with mystery as a structure is that the writer enters into competition with the reader instead of partnership.”

I’d argue that I also want to land somewhere new, but through the knowledge and context, where I can apply my own inferences and judgments. I’ve argued before that the reader collaborating with the writer by being allowed the space to make inferences and judgments is one foundation of the flash form that separates it from longer narratives, especially the novel.

I’d also argue that this desire to keep things from the reader isn’t always thought out, nor is it always applied with an intimate understanding of the story. The writer might be leaving out context and information in an abstract way, one without purpose or artifice. That the writer is just as lost as their story in this draft, which is understandable, but how often have we wanted to skip the steps of revision and hit send on these stories, hoping our readers will “get it.” That we’ve lucked into some genius story through obfuscation and called it mystery? I’m raising my hand high, lamenting some of those early story drafts and attempts I dashed off to some unsuspecting litmag first reader. Surely, they rarely made it to the editor. I mistook abstraction for feeling, for resonance, that kept my reader lost in language, in characters floating without a setting on the page, with an aura of mystery, that I assumed would keep them reading. Usually, it meant that I had no idea where to take the story, what the character might do to create “meaningful action.”

Saunders again: “If you know where a story is going, don’t hoard it. Make the story go there, now. But then what? What will you do next? You’ve surrendered your big reveal. Exactly. Often, in our doubt that we have a real story to tell, we hold something back, fearing that we don’t have anything else. And this can be a form of trickery. Surrendering that thing is a leap of faith that forces the story to attention, saying to it, in effect, “You have to do better than that, and now that I’ve denied you your trick, your first order solution, I know that you will.”

I think it’s safe to assume that the trick has already been done, that maybe you could come up with another trick, but why not expend that energy on finding other ways to be specific and unique in plot, in character choices, in the particular pressure that’s forcing them toward a reckoning? This will move you past the obvious, the expected, and will allow the character to dwell in the story, to become real in the reader’s mind, which will focus the narrative on the character rather than the concept.

How often does the concept flounder after the first paragraph? Especially those cloaked in mystery. Stories where we don’t have an idea of who the main character is, or what they want, or why they are even in this story in the first place. The exposition or information we receive is so obtuse that we can’t connect it to the main character, can’t see how it might create escalation in the plot, how we might understand the why of any given action, and it might just freeze the main character in stasis. Here, the story devolves into a vignette or an anecdote.

Of the anecdotal, Saunders says, “The story form asks of the merely anecdotal: ‘Yeah, but so what?” What transforms an anecdote into a story is escalation…”

And what causes an escalation besides stakes for the character? They have to win or lose something, or be moved in one of these directions. Escalations are cause and effect, but made specific and particular to this character’s desire, fear, or problem within the container of this story. If things are getting worse or better, how are they getting this way? Something needs to spark the character to act, react in a chain of events. Those events are the escalation, especially in flash, where they might be smaller, might come in the form of ribbons of narrative rather than large scenes.

But as Charles Baxter says, “We want the experience.” So how do we create this so-called experience when we only have one thousand words? If we can agree with Saunders that “A story is a linear-temporal phenomenon. It proceeds, and charms us (or doesn’t), a line at a time.” We can see how important or powerful each word, sentence, and paragraph is in the flash form. How easy it is to lose the reader when the story can only operate one line at a time.

We might even be charged with the crime of creating less life on the page, especially when we eschew the internal thoughts of the character, when we rely so heavily on the inferences and the judgments of the reader.

Sharon Oard Warner in Writing the Novella says, “Until the writer knows why she is telling the story, she won’t know which details are necessary. Because all writing is an argument for the way one sees the world, the listener/reader must be convinced to believe. Orienting information is the first step in providing the story’s foundation.”

The flash writer has less space and time to convince the reader of the believability of the story, its setting, characters, and plot.

“It (the short story) is not a documentary or rigorous accounting of the passage of time or a fair-minded attempt to show life as it is really lived; it’s a radically shaped, even somewhat cartoonish…little machine that thrills us with the extremity of its decisiveness.” Even more so for flash and micro, because there’s no way to make it fair-minded to life. You must account for the artfulness of the form to create life in a compression machine, to skip unnecessary dialogue and exposition that gets in the way of the story's urgency and intimacy. The rigor comes from the ruthlessness of brevity, which allows for distillation, yet makes the narrative specific and unique in plot and characterization. Brevity should/and can cut abstraction and obfuscation out like a surgeon’s scalpel, getting us to the bone or more to the cellular level of a particular story.

“So, “good writerly habit” might consist of continually revising toward specificity, so specificity can appear and then produce plot (or as we prefer to call it, “meaningful action”).”

Specificity, in flash, creates the stage for action, for pressure to be put on your character, to show or reveal them as unique and particular people, people we are intrigued by for the duration of the story. Mystery and abstraction can be intriguing, but they don’t often lead intrigue to the story; they hoard it for themselves. They are the opposite of “meaningful” and keep us distanced from the character and their plight.

Good Trouble: The Art of Storytelling

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