Conveying Time in Microfiction
Summary to Scene
How much time can a microfiction cover? A second, a day, a week, a year? One of the challenges of writing stories with small word counts is trying to convey the gravitas of time and the pressure that time puts on characters. To earn a feeling or reaction by a character, readers often want to see a character struggle for a certain length of time, but how do we convey this while using brevity and compression?
For our first example, Let’s look at “Summer of ‘77” by Karen Crawford.
It was a summer of sweltering heat. Of Studio 54. The Son of Sam. It was the Summer a city blacked out. The darkness came in one long wave, disappearing an iconic skyline along with it. And, for a moment, the neighborhood was still. The kind of still you see in movies before a big scare. When my sister sneaks up on me, I almost scream.
I love that this gives us an overview/summary of that year, but it’s not static! It’s really active and full of great details! The last line puts us into a scene that is continued with the next paragraph! This is a great way of going from a long view to a close-up view!
Normally, I’d question a story starting with a summary, but this one is using very specific details and events. It provides us with the unique perspective of the narrator/main character in a specific setting. The setting provides the pressure of the conflict. This character has/is going through a lot, and the shorthand works here to alert us to all that they’ve been dealing with. There’s a tension in the everyday.
Each detail/event/place is given more power by the white space between each period. As Grant Faulkner says, “When something is omitted or unspoken, the imagination has to work to fill in the gaps.” Crawford wants the reader to ruminate on these things, to bring their knowledge or baggage to this story, to help us understand the life this character is living in this moment! And I love how we fast forward in this last sentence, the camera zooming into the view of the sister scaring the narrator. A deft use of having a wide view and moving into a tight shot of our characters!
True, we’re only using words, but there’s a power in manipulating the camera, creating a closeness or distance between the character and the reader. This is a trick of narrative depth that, when wielded with precision and deliberateness, can make a good story unforgettable.
Minutes ago, I was heating Arroz con Gandules on the stove, my sister dancing in front of the air conditioner to Donna Summer's I Feel Love. Now, I'm lighting the sainted candle Mama keeps in the sink while the cockroaches scatter. The apartment becomes an oven. My sister opens the kitchen window, and the stench of garbage that hasn't been picked up for days slips in. It smells like the forgotten. We're suffocating, glued to the window because Mama isn't home from night school after working all day. Sweating bullets as trash cans blaze, and the streets fill with shadows. The silence shattered by breaking glass and pop, pop, pops.
I love how Crawford uses time tags as transitions between sections. We have a narrator that is fully in control of the release of story information. The narrator leaves the summary of the year, and we’re in the more intimate scene happening minutes ago, and then now, as they try to take care of themselves during a blackout in the sweltering heat, as destruction and violence simmer outside. The narrator is caught between two worlds, and to make it worse, their mother is out there where anything could happen to her.
Later, I'll want to remember this night like my father does—in his midtown apartment with his midtown wife and tell his story like it's my own, where neighbors share candles and meals and cocktails. But up here on 116th street, Mama doesn't have a midtown husband. And doors stay locked, and rallying cries of "It's Christmastime!" are bouncing off faded bricks and metal fire escapes.
And now our narrator uses a flash forward to escape this moment! Crawford uses all the tricks of time to create resonance and depth. This moment is too important to this character to stay in its narrative box! Great choice to compare and contrast in the 3rd paragraph, revealing these characters through their opposites, and the story is still moving ahead as it deepens! That’s the true trick of micro-stories!
This respite from the heat and the danger, this retelling depending on where you live, has so much truth to it that it reveals a lot about the narrator’s character and her relationship with both of her parents.
From our window, we witness the wilding. Friends. Neighbors. Thieves. The powerless suddenly powerful. Pillaging storefronts. Running with televisions, stereos, boomboxes... food. We press our sweaty palms together in solidarity until we see Mama racing up the block, dodging looters being looted. Her long caramel hair flying. A beacon in the dark.
Smart shift back to the front/current story. Our respite from the violence is over, and we’re brought back to this moment of fear and tension. Notice the return to the one-word sentences, the power of making us rest on each one of these groups of people, how on a night like this night it’s hard to tell who belongs to what group. And from the shadows comes the mother, dodging danger.The mother returning, this “beacon in the dark” that makes this more than a vignette and a full-fledged story. This narrator had so much to lose. She may not even have known it at the time, but surely we have made this inference? And the narrator is rewarded by her observations, by her storytelling because the mother is returned to her. The world may be chaos outside, but it will be corrected in the house now that the mother is safely home! Sometimes rewarding our characters is how we edge our stories toward a sense of hope, a glimmer of happiness.
Consider the structure of this micro:
Active summary paragraph denoting the events and places of a particular year, using one-word sentences to add gravitas and ending with an introduction of the main character and the level of tension she is under to start the front/current story.
A manipulation of time, to tell us what happened in the past (here a few minutes ago), and then a return to the current time frame, where the danger and mood of this year have invaded the narrator’s safe place. The whole year is bad, but the narrator wants to focus o the dangers of this moment, and wants to create an immediacy to her actions and feelings. Additionally, the mother isn’t safe…an added conflict or escalation!
A flash forward as a sense of respite from the fear, the danger, creating a comparison of how danger lurks differently depending on the setting and the context.
Back to the current story, the sweltering heat, the pressure to do something but remain safe, while worrying about her mother, who has the ability to make everything okay by returning, though the odds aren’t in her favor! A return to the one-word phrases, reminding us that there’s so much more this narrator could say, that she;’s been through more than this event, but this encapsulates this year, her life. And the end comes in the form of a mother returning, a metaphor for safety and light.
Prompt: Start as Crawford does with an active summary of a certain year/time period, then blend it right into the scene in the second paragraph. Use Transition phrases as needed, and try to stay in scene and yet deepen/reveal the characters at the same time, especially in that 3rd paragraph! Play with the opposites in the characters, and show how this small event in a year of major events has the power to change/shift the main character, how this event can stand for their entire lives!
Flash I’ve Enjoyed:
Swimming Upstream by Amy Barnes
Giulia by Keri Miller
BLACK BOTTOM SWAMP BOTTLE WOMAN by K. B. Carle
Boiling Point by Christine H. Chen
Try At Home: Start with a packing list for a fantastical place. What would you need to bring? How can you write about each object in its own section/paragraph that creates narrative and reveals the main character? If you were packing to be one of the first people on Mars, what would you bring? A land full of unicorns? A city inhabited by aliens? The objects can be otherworldly or realistic from Earth but provide context and meaning to each item.
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Appreciate the breakdown in this piece, Tommy. Thank you.