Are You Talking to Me?
Getting the Right Tone in Flash Fiction
One of the harder things to talk about when breaking down how a particular flash works on a craft level is describing and showing how a writer uses tone to establish not only the voice of the piece but also to give it a certain feeling of “this is worth reading” and “this is a writer/narrator we can trust to take us through this specific experience.” I often think that writers think that flash is so short that they don’t need to finesse or craft the opening, that they can get away with being a little wordy or chatty in the opening and the reader will forgive them, but just because the story is “short” doesn’t mean we don’t hunger for the artifice of story, of a well-crafted narrative, of an experience that has been molded or chiseled like the best pieces of art. Writing flash is hard, like writing poetry is hard. Making meaning from brevity leaves a lot of opportunity for error, failure, and the chance that the words don’t add up to a worthwhile story. This is the tightrope we walk, right? But, here’s the good news: writing these stories, even if they fail, doesn’t take years like novels don’t require heaving plotting, so we’re free to explore hundreds of stories in a much shorter time. We can always jump back in.
Cetacean, by Lukasz Drobnik, opens with a near-perfect tone, and I want to explore how he creates this voice and this experience for his readers.
The beach, now a graveyard, stretches far below us against the background of the calm sea.
One way to establish tone is to work in phrasing that creates immediate opposites or goes against our expectations. We don’t expect a beach to be a graveyard, and I love the way it’s stuck in by the commas. I also love how the seas are calm, another unexpected element as our minds try to catch up to a beach being a land of death. It’s like being pulled in and washed out, like waves on the page.
Onlookers swarm around the place with cameras and mobile phones, all pointed at one spot. We’re sitting on the cliff, on the drab flower-patterned blanket you hated so much, with a bag full of beers, having a picnic that must do for a wake.
Pay attention to the use of verbs, swarm, pointed, sitting, and having. Not dynamic is definition, but dynamic for connoting movement. This isn’t a static scene. Our narrator knows how to relay the details to us, the writer has crafted a moving, surging picture below, and returns to the unexpected, by juxtaposing a picnic and a wake, with the graveyard of the beach, and the calm sea. And we also have the direct address to the “you” character, one that isn’t there but is there through their hatred and the narrator’s intimacy with what the “you” wouldn’t like. Small, subtle touches build flash stories, create characters out of the mist, put us in a particular time and place for this main character.
She’s lying on a bed made of sand and brown seaweed and plastic washed ashore.
I’ll admit that ending the opening with a mystery can be a risk. There’s some catching up we need to do to figure out who the “you” and she is, but I prefer the mystery of this image of this character over a mystery about the context that led to internal thoughts or feelings. I want to live in the concrete, the specific, and Drobnik has created this reading contract for me with this opening. I’m ready to discover, to fall further inside this experience!
I’ve barely stayed in touch with T since I moved here. It’s unfair, but I just didn’t want to remember. I know he holds a grudge. I can see it in his eyes, in the hesitant movement of his strong hairy arm as he hands me another bottle, but he doesn’t say a thing. It’ll take a few beers more before he spits it out.
A bit of context and exposition in this second paragragh, a way for us to understand the tension the narrator is feeling. It’s also a good way to create expectancy from the reader. We start to understand what is at stake for this narrator. It’s more than the wake; it’s more than the dead whale on the beach. These create the story occasion that lets us into the deeper story for this main character. The narrator is waiting, so we’re waiting, too.
Now we laugh talking about you, about that day you decided to go back to jogging and bought those dreadful pink trainers to match your rain jacket. It rained ceaselessly that month. T scratches his thick beard and places his hand on his bulging black sweatshirt. He looks up at the cloudy sky and says it’s going to rain.
Here, we’re back to creating the character of the “you”, making them particular and specific by sharing one detail out of many from their life. I love the way the details are filtered about what the narrator sees when describing T. There’s an unsaid intimacy here, a longing, but the narrator doesn’t fall into large blocks of internal thought or descriptions of what his body is doing while he looks at T. Drobnik is smart to let us, the reader, do all of that inferencing, that imagining. It brings us closer, deeper into the story. I love how the details of the “you” character and the way the clouds look while they mourn them are connected. As if metaphorically, their grief can affect their external setting. If the metaphor is given too much power, too much space and detail, it can become heavyhanded and cheesy, but Drobnik keeps it subtle, trusts his reader to get there. And maybe this is what I mean when I evoke “tone” this ability to give the reader just what they need and nothing more? So much of the narrative silt, exposition, feelings, descriptions of the body having abstract feelings or actions, the delving into backstory that doesn’t put pressure on the main character to act, have all been filtered out.
A beachside necropsy supposedly revealed she was pregnant. Slit open, she rests on the sandy beach waiting for a flatbed lorry to take her to a landfill. T says it’s always going to be this way. It’ll never cease, not really. We’ll just have to accept it as a part of our lives, learn to live with it somehow.
I’m also impressed by the way this story uses the segments and the white space. Here, we’re back to the front story, the view of this dead whale on the beach, but look how the deeper story of “You”’s death collides and exerts pressure on this theme of death, of the loss of relationship with those that are gone and those that are here, that might remind us of those we’ve lost. The signal of the collision is the line, “T Says it’s always going to be this way…” I love it when characters can be equally speaking about two things at once. Here it’s the whale's death, of this continuing, but also the death of their friend. Some micros might have ended here on this down note, this cynical but possibly realist sentiment. But Drobnik gives himself, the reader, these characters four more paragraphs. He’s not done exploring all the parts of this story.
She’s a sperm whale. Her grey skin reflects the sky, between towels left by those who thought she could be saved. She died within hours, reduced to what she is now: a rare tourist attraction in this somnolent village. T opens another bottle with his teeth, which always gives me the shivers. Then he resumes talking about a girl he’s started seeing, who’s lovely and whom I’m going to meet when I finally visit him.
Notice that this is the first time that she is identified, and there’s some satisfaction in getting there, as the reader, before it’s mentioned. We feel like we’re a part of the story. Notice again how the two stories will collide again in this line, “She died within hours, reduced to what she is now: a rare tourist attraction in this somnolent village.” Not only the whale, but the “you” who is lost everywhere but in their memories, in their ability or non-ability to talk about her. Death can make us no more than a curiosity, a thing that comes between us. And then a line that gets us back to the intimacy between these characters, a quick showing of how the narrator’s body is reacting, before we’re told that T. has a girlfriend, that if the inference is correct, this is another person lost to our narrator, and they and us find out at the same time. It's an uncomfortable irony that hopefully makes us care even more about our main character.
They never found your body. Someone happened upon your shoe, the vividly pink trainer, a few miles downstream of our town. But that’s it, as if you disintegrated in the cold running water, dissolved into foam. Dissolving into foam sounds much less dreadful than clutching at water plants, struggling for breath and feeling needles in your lungs.
Now we know why the picnic is standing in for the wake. They can’t hold a proper funeral. Drobnik could have introduced this in the beginning, but the death of “you” isn’t the most important part of the story, even if it is the reason that brings him together with T. after all this time. This is why structure is so important in flash fiction. It literally can create fresh takes on old stories. This is also why using a first-person narrator comes with different craft choices. When and how information/context is delivered can change the tone of the story, can change the tension points, can change how the main character reacts.
Notice, too, that we return to the image of that shoe, how it opens the narrator’s imagination, how we return to the idea of water, of the sea, how it can save the whale but kill the “you.” How we have to infer his feelings about her, the way she might have died, how his feelings aren’t easy to categorize. My favorite flashes rarely name the character’s feelings, but rather show them acting and reacting, and filtering their feelings through the details of the setting and the world around them.
I like to think you became that river, filling its channel from source to mouth, spreading further out to the bay, to the sea, to the ocean, wrapping the Earth with a thick mantle of water and now sending me this beached whale as a belated goodbye. Or perhaps you transformed into her. Maybe it’s really you down there, heavily pregnant, opened up and covered in barnacles, with one fin broken and buried in the sand.
In this paragraph, our narrator separates themselves from T. This isn’t something they will or want to get used to. That death has meaning, that it connects us, or at least they want to hope that it connects them to the “you.” That the “you’s” death is not a total loss, that it is giving the narrator this moment above the beach, this moment of seeing something unexpected, something not often repeated, a spectacle, one last hurrah. The whale is the central image/metaphor, and Drobnik uses it to connect all three parts of this story, for the “you” to become more significant in death, by being transformed. Irrational? Sure, but death and grief can take us to different experiential planes. Who hasn’t hoped for something more than just death, just lostness? And this turn toward imagination, toward fabulism works, because the writer/narrator has earned our trust. Tone has a way of creating this kind of trust.
T gazes at me and smiles. He says he’s missed me. Then he looks away and down at the beach, at the dozens of hands holding flashing phones, dozens of feet treading the sand and avoiding small puddles. He takes a gulp, puts the bottle down and holds out his hand to feel the first drops of rain. The lorry arrives.
There’s an argument to be made that we could have ended the penultimate paragraph with a glimpse of his hopeful imagination, but we’d be chopping off a piece of this story if we don’t return to T. Can the narrator’s hope also give him back his sense of intimacy with T.? Will he break the barrier and tell him his feelings? This feels like the opportunity, right? Drobnik invites this confession through T.’s smile and his admittance of missing the narrator, but the camera focuses on the people below, the way they are still inside the spectacle. T. even holds out his hand, and the tension here is ripe, ready to bust, and instead of the narrator reaching out, T. is left with only feeling the rain, this water that can save or kill. The moment of intimacy is killed by the water, the weather, and the arrival of the vehicle that will end their wake. I love this flash because it allows me to live this moment on the stage of the story with this main character. I’m not pushed away by vague feelings or too much internal thought. I’m invited into the story by the story’s tone and handling of specific details. Drobnik trusted me to trust him, and this is a deeper, more resonant story for this.
Prompt:
This might work better for revision. Find a piece that isn’t quite working, and underline all of the verbs in the opening. Check that it’s an active scene, something you can imagine or feel physically. Now underline all of the feeling words or where the narrator uses large chunks of internal thought. How much of this can be cut? In what ways can you add the unexpected to your draft? Can you add it to your opening sentence? Maybe create something happening in a place we wouldn’t expect it to happen. Consider how you can create distance or evaluation between your characters and other characters in the setting. A main character looking down at the story occasion can be powerful and can show the world in a new way. Invite the unrequited in, show us the intimacy between these characters without using words like love, want, lust, need, and show us the intimacy between them. Introduce something missing or lost, show us how imagining a different outcome for this person or object can instill some hope! Create a story where the reader trusts the writer/narrator from the beginning.
Favorite Flashes Lately:
First Dream of the Dead by Lisa Alletson
The Salesmen by Matt Barrett
The Trouble with Lava by Amy Barnes
Try At Home:
Write about a character experiencing something for the first time. Write about a character experiencing something for the hundredth time. Write about a character witnessing someone else experiencing something for the first time.
Write With Me:
The Engine of Narratives: Openings, Metaphors, and Characters Zoom Generative Session
Date: Wednesday, February 21, 2024
Time: 5 to 7 pm CENTRAL STANDARD TIME
Cost: $50
Join author Tommy Dean for a 2-hour generative writing session focused on The Engine of Narratives: Openings, Metaphors, and Characters. Make dreading the blank page a thing of the past! There are many ways to write a story, but these three elements can make the writing easier and more dynamic. We’ll look at model texts and get inspired by the writing prompts! Past students have published stories inspired by my prompts in today’s best literary magazines. Will you join them?
From Opening to Ending: Writing a Flash Fiction Draft, 1 session with Tommy Dean
Saturday, March 16th 11 -1 pm EST
online, 30 students max
$50
Enroll for this class.
Join writer Tommy Dean for a two-hour generative writing session focused on creating one full flash draft from opening to ending to everything in-between. We’ll look at model texts and use prompts for each element of a successful flash including openings, escalation, backstory, metaphor, middles, endings, and titles. Instead of 5-6 separate starts, we’ll concentrate on crafting one full story with inspiring prompts for each craft element. Come create a complete and urgent story with me and your fellow writers!
This is a fantastic class. You remind me of my teacher of fiction II at the university, I like the way you share your understanding of the story and the use of language. I'll keep reading!
Such a helpful post, thank you. Insightful to follow you break down a piece of flash.