Desire: The Character Engine
There's something inviting about a story or a character that reveals their wants and desires in the opening line or paragraph. Flash and Microfiction, because of their short amount of time on stage, often suffer from being too coy about their story occasions or inciting incidents. Occasionally, we read a story, even one that's less than 300 words, and we shake our heads at the end, wondering what the story was about or why the author wrote it. This is why story occasion is so important. Story Occasion equals Why this character, in this place, at this time? There's a lot of emotional and resonant power in being able to answer these questions at the end of the story. The roots of these answers often come in the very beginning.
We’re often told not to write directly the wants or desires of our characters. We’re guided toward action and context, a chance for the reader to make inferences and judgments based on what is supposed to feel like an experience while reading. In fact, this is my usual approach to writing flash, my guidelines for when hoping to create resonant and fresh stories. But all guidelines are allowed to be broken or disregarded if the story demands another form of narration or a unique structure. In “We Wanted More” by Justin Torres, we’re given a story with a dynamic collective first-person narrative that refuses to hide their desire and wants from the reader.
We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats, we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more.
What intrigues me about this opening paragraph is that each desire or want, though stated or told, is provided a specific detail or action, one that helps me visualize and experience these feelings. This story starts at level ten and doesn’t look back. Its form of telling fits the structure of young children telling a story about their less-than-normal lives! Instant empathy and maybe a bit of annoyance too, but having multiple feelings already is a good sign of a great story! There’s nothing static here, and we can learn so much from this opening about using small actions. Torres has built a plot or escalation engine, and we know it’s going to take us places!
When it was cold, we fought over blankets until the cloth tore down the middle. When it was really cold, when our breath came out in frosty clouds, Manny crawled into bed with Joel and me.
‘Body heat,’ he said.
‘Body heat,’ we agreed.
We wanted more flesh, more blood, more warmth.
The second paragraph can often be the undoing of a good story, because lots of writers drop into exposition mode in order to create context for what occurred in the first paragraph. This often works and is needed, but it’s a familiar use of structure, so it can slow the narrative down right when it got started, and I often think that flash resists this sense of slowing down, that we can gain context even as we rocket into the major space of the story! Torres definitely has to be careful because he’s already telling us the character’s feelings, so going deeper into backfill/backstory might have grounded this story to a halt. But he gives us a mini-scene to show how competitive these boys are, how close their relationship is, how they’re dealing with not having what they need or desire. We get to see them on the stage of the story. We get to see them as separate characters before he collects their voice into one narrator again!
When we fought, we fought with weapons – boots and garage tools, snapping pliers – we grabbed at whatever was nearest and we hurled it through the air; we wanted more broken dishes, more shattered glass. We wanted more crashes.
Torres spins away from the scene and back to the established structure of telling us their wants, this time in the idea of destruction. Notice they don’t explain why they want to break things because they can’t! This allows the reader space to make inferences, make judgments, and consider their own childhoods. Involving the reader only strengthens their sense of empathy. One way to create movement in flash is to use a structure based on the story engine you’ve created. Torres knows he needs to come back to this form of desire shouting, that it’s the contract he’s created with the reader. Readers look for patterns, and the writer has the ability to complete the pattern or play against it, but each is a choice that deepens the pathos of the story. Torres returns to another mini-scene, and a structure is starting to emerge.
And when our Paps came home, we got spankings. Our little round butt cheeks were tore up: red, raw, leather-whipped. We knew there was something on the other side of pain, on the other side of the sting. Prickly heat radiated upward from our thighs and backsides, fire consumed our brains, but we knew that there was something more, some place our Paps was taking us with all this. We knew, because he was meticulous, because he was precise, because he took his time.
Here’s the middle of the story, but no dialogue in this scene. The narrator wants us to understand that this punishment means something, even if they can’t quite explain it to us. Torres is melding the mental and the physical here, escalating the story, and showing us that these boys are willing to twist the negative toward their own desires.
And when our father was gone, we wanted to be fathers. We hunted animals. We drudged through the muck of the creek, chasing down bullfrogs and water snakes. We plucked the baby robins from their nest. We liked to feel the beat of tiny hearts, the struggle of tiny wings. We brought their tiny animal faces close to ours.
Now we get a shift, one that feels naive, but these are children, after all. They desire to become their father, to have the kind of power he has over them on something else, something weaker. Suddenly our story is about power dynamics and how they shift as the boys get older. We haven’t been told they’re older but the white space is a hint of passing time. Their motivations are changing. They have been stopped in their trajectory and placed on a different path because of their father’s usual of corporeal punishment. What, we wonder, will happen to them next, and also, what will they want next?
Always more, always hungrily scratching for more. But there were times, quiet moments, when our mother was sleeping, when she hadn’t slept in two days, and any noise, any stair creak, any shut door, any stifled laugh, any voice at all, might wake her – those still, crystal mornings, when we wanted to protect her, this confused goose of a woman, this stumbler, this gusher, with her backaches and headaches and her tired, tired ways, this uprooted Brooklyn creature, this tough talker, always with tears when she tells us she loves us, her mixed-up love, her needy love, her warmth –
And there’s even more to this long, final paragraph. I love the risk here of writing without pause or paragraph break, of knowing that this is a switch of gears, a new way for them to act, to try to tamp down their desires to protect their mother from their loud and destructive ways. I love how this creates a dichotomy of how they act around their father versus their mother; how Torres makes this part of the tension of the story, part of the change or shift we expect as we run out of story real estate!
on those mornings, when sunlight found the cracks in our blinds, and laid itself down in crisp strips on our carpet, those quiet mornings, when we’d fixed ourselves oatmeal, and sprawled on to our stomachs with crayons and paper, with glass marbles that we were careful not to rattle, when our mother was sleeping, when the air did not smell like sweat or breath or mould, when the air was still and light, those mornings, when silence was our secret game and our gift and our sole accomplishment – we wanted less: less weight, less work, less noise, less father, less muscles and skin and hair. We wanted nothing, just this, just this.
The reason this shift in desire, in temperament, works so well is that it’s provided to the reader so upfront, so loud with specific and unique details, that the opposite ways they act in this final paragraph have to be just as quiet, just as specific, just as endearing as it was annoying in that first paragraph! So little and yet so much has taken place in this microfiction, and a lot of how we relate to these actions, especially the ones that feel familiar, are because of the ingenious structure of the story, the risk Torres takes by telling us flatly, but loudly what these characters want!
This story starts with an all-out sprint but slows to a sloth’s pace, and that’s a perfect way to control how the reader experiences a story!
Micros derive their power from concrete, specific details, velocity, and depth, a spotlight on a true, impactful moment in a character's life. Micro's power resonates in the unsaid, in the flash of visceral and evocative language. They dazzle in their shortness and their ability to create empathy in such a short space on the page while they drill deep into the consciousness of the reader.
Prompt: Start with stating boldly but flatly exactly what your character(s) wants. Don't start with descriptions, but the rawness of their voice, the statement of their desire. Follow this feeling to build your story. What details are the most important when trying to convince the reader of our character's feelings, their desires? How can you make this a story rather than a vignette? Pay attention to the way Torres uses a specific list of wants, each one an escalation.
Monthly Flash reading:
Woman Like Her Grandmother by Allison Field Bell
THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE WORLD by Sarah Freligh
PATAGIUM BY K.C. MEAD-BREWER
Wild Things by Kathy Fish
Why Max and Ying Decided to Make a Sex Tape by Eliot Li
Try At Home:
Find a flash that you’re struggling to find your way in and find all of the actions, big and/or small and highlight them in some way. Are these actions escalating? Are there large chunks of exposition or explanation surrounding these actions? How much of the exposition and explanation could you cut and still keep the necessary context? What’s the main impulse that is pushing your character to act or make choices? If this element is missing, how would the story improve if there was a catalyst to make your character act?
Write with Me!