One of the things that Flash has to do in its openings is to give us an idea of both conflicts governing the story: The one on the surface, the immediate problem, and the conflict simmering in the character’s past. One way to add depth to flash is to have these two conflicts crash together, to drive both the outside narrative and the interior story submerged within our main character.
There are several ways that these two conflicts can create plot, one being the crash or collision of them at the climax, but also they can run parallel and never touch, or they might cross by each other, so close the main character feels the heat of the near crash, and makes a change or takes action due to the nearness of the competing tensions.
Short stories and novels use these forms of structure too, but they have more room to dwell in the interior, to build up the possible collisions. But flash must make these conflicts come alive in few words and in a smaller space, making them come together like bonded atoms, streaking toward each other with a velocity that is negated in longer narratives by their sheer size and space between escalations.
In “Landfall” by Jiksun Cheung, we get a structure that highlights both conflicts from the opening paragraph and works toward bringing them into collision as soon as the story starts. Even the use of present tense heightens the speed of the story, putting us “in the now” with the main character. The tense promises that the reader and character will experience the story together in the same timeframe.
In the time that my mother has been missing, the skies have turned a gray, roiling mass. The radio is calling it the most violent typhoon to make landfall in thirty-two years.
I love stories that announce it will depict an atypical day for its main character. That the story has meaning because things are different from the usual. We love routine so much that there’s tension in just portraying a break from the regular. This is a subtle use of tension, one that intrigues on the sly rather than falling through the trap door of the plot.
We’ve looked everywhere, and there’s nowhere else left except here, in the ruins of the abandoned Wah Fung housing estate, where my mother and I once lived in a tiny room on the sixth floor.
Notice the rendering of the present and the past; the more we learn about the past, the more pressure it puts on the character. Our main character is not only looking for a lost parent in the middle of a storm, which is bad enough, but he has to also face his past, and the feeling it springs in him. Feelings he’s been avoiding for years. This is what makes him a specific and unique character, this past.
Just looking for his mother in an atypical storm isn’t enough. There’d be no revealing of this character, because it would mirror stories we’ve already read/watched. Our characters must be rescued from the graveyard of all the characters we’ve experienced in the consuming of other stories in all mediums. And remember you must do it in as few words as possible so you don’t lose the narrative drive, so you don’t lose the sense of compression and brevity, so you keep things moving in both conflicts. You’re not allowed a page of backstory or even a few sentences about his physical appearance; a meandering tour through his psyche takes up too much room.
In the clearing outside, a squall tears at my flimsy raincoat and drags an old banyan tree snapping and splintering to the ground. A battered No Trespassing sign flits overhead and ricochets off the crumbling façade. I find an embroidered shoe near the entrance, swirling in the ankle-deep floodwater like a goldfish in the murk.
It is so smart not to fall into the backstory/backfill impulse to show/tell us why he would want to avoid this place. No, Cheung delves further into the richness of the setting, by providing us with the visuals of the place, by showing us what the narrator is seeing, so we can make inferences about his feelings. We also experience the looming dread of this place. This is not where you want to find a loved one in the middle of a storm. We get to intuit this through the implications of the details and the description not of the past but of the present, while we wait to learn more about the character’s past. How long can Cheung keep us waiting is a great game of building tension!
Three more separate one-line paragraphs of the immediate scene before we get to learn about the past. I love the use of dialogue here, the way that dialogue is always immediate, always a way of making a story more in the present. Even a slip into the rhetorical keeps us on edge. Also, it is not a bad way of transition to thoughts of the past to backfilling in the context we need to “produce plot (or as we prefer to call it, “meaningful action”).” (George Saunders).
I try to recall the last time we were all together: Maggie, the boys, me, my mother, sitting around our dining table. The food getting cold. The nursing-home pamphlet opened to the page where an elderly couple beams at the camera, surrounded by family.
Stories often make their meaning from the past, by providing the reader with a context for why we should care about these characters, how we can find the human in them, something to root for as we read. This is one way to put the “reality” or verisimilitude into fiction. The juxtaposition of the familiar and unique develops characterization, makes the people of our stories as real as they can be in the space of this particular narrative.
I clear the dishes and the boys are fast asleep, even after my mother quietly shuts the door to her room and turns off the light, all I can hear is: “You always choose what is best for you.”
Cheung pulls off a great craft move by cementing the root of the current conflict in the backstory. He makes it meaningful to the current story. I love it when the backstory can ignite the current story with tension, with an escalation, a pressure to make the main character act or make a choice. Backstory is meant to reveal our characters through their past choices and attitudes, but it works even better when it adds tension and conflict in our current stories. Like dialogue, backstory must do more than one thing in a flash-length story. Everything has weight, a weight the character pulls throughout the storyline.
I stumble through the flooded corridors, flashlight in hand, until I see the old provisions store, tucked beneath the stairwell, where my mother used to work.
The shutters on one side have collapsed, revealing a row of empty shelves. I think of my mother stacking tins of oily fried dace, her thick, black hair in a knot, the radio behind the counter crackling a Teresa Teng love song. She pauses in front of the radio before changing the channel and then tells me to finish my homework before she locks up.
I find the other shoe on a landing about halfway up, waterlogged and torn at the sole. The whistling continues unabated.
In flashes with lots of segments, we can think of these segments as kind of chapters in a novel. Each segment needs to provide context, characterization, backfill/backstory, and the advancement of the plot/current story while escalating things or adding tension. Here the tension is enhanced by the specific and particular details of the setting, of how the place used to be and how it is now, which is dangerous. And I love how the narrator finds the other shoe, how much menace the visual of separated shoes can hold over us. We don’t leave our shoes voluntarily in spaces outside of our homes.
Flash doesn’t always have such an evident climax, but this story gives a lot of space to this plot point. Some writers might have stopped after the narrator found the mother in the old home, but Cheun wisely lets this scene play out. He’s been building to this escalation and he knows we want to be there in that room with our main character.
I step into my childhood home at the end of a long corridor on the sixth floor. The room is empty, save for the candle on the floor, painting the peeling walls a flickering orange, and the figure by the window struggling with the handle.
“Ma—are you hurt?” I say. “What are you doing?”
I so enjoy Cheung’s patience, his pacing in this moment. The setting is important so we get a slow pan of the camera from the narrator’s perspective. It’s empty, barren, except for what he came to find. Everything is connoted to be happening at once if you feel the energy of all those -ing words holding us there, experiencing the room, the situation.
And so many options for this line of dialogue, but I love that the narrator starts with concern, but after a pause, starts with the blame, the questioning of her desires, her rationality. Another way to see that the order of what we write has an impact on the story, on the reader!
She is surprised to see me, but then her expression hardens. “It’s rusted shut,” she says. “Can’t get it open.”
“Come on, Ma.” I put an arm around her shoulder, but she pulls away.
“Just let me do this,” she says.
“Come on—we shouldn’t even be here.”
I love how the dialogue is handled here, how the characters have separate missions, separate desires, how the roles have been reversed, how because of the backstory provided earlier, we can see how important this place is to this family, so it’s not unrealistic that she would want to dwell in this place regardless of the danger. A great way to play out this scene, this climax, to show us how important this moment is to these characters. A writer of flash must consider how to balance the section of each story, of how much time to give to each section or scene, and sometimes the climax isn’t given enough time, enough patience, because we’re already thinking of how to end the story.
“I didn’t ask you to come.”
This is what happens when we talk: words fly out of our mouths, but we never seem to understand each other. “What do you want, then, Ma?”
“Just—help me,” she says. “Please.”
Outside, the rain surges like waves on rock. The whistling is louder, too, coming from all directions, rising and falling, as if seeking harmony but never quite finding it. I realize she’ll never leave this place until she does whatever she’s here to do.
I love that the mother, like the storm, is unrelenting, that she has a goal, and she will accomplish it before she leaves. That line of exposition (This is what happens when we talk) provides another beat of context, that they’ve been struggling with this for a long time, and it’s under more pressure in this moment than usual. That this is the narrator’s chance to act differently, to have a bit of a change, because they’ve had a small realization. One that feels earned by everything that has come before this moment in the story. I love how the two realizations are interrupted by the reminder of the storm of the reminder of the main conflict and how it has put pressure on the deeper conflict. The conflicts coming to a head not only create the space for the realization, but they are fully realized by this moment. The conflicts haven’t missed each other, but have collided!
I raise the heavy flashlight and bring it down sharply on the handle. Once, twice. A crack, and then something gives way. The window explodes, ejected by a mighty pressure. The candle goes out. And I remember.
The day of the big typhoon, thirty-two years ago.
Cheun’s choice for the narrator to act is a great move in this story. He doesn’t fulfill her desire through speech or through misdirection, but instead gets physical. And there’s weight added to this action because it’s not simply rectified, but it takes effort, a kind of violence, and destruction. A lot of writers might have ended with that candle going out. I’m sure I would have thought that was pretty slick, and it is one way to end this story. The climax is done, the realization found and met through physical action to complete the mother’s mission, to complete the mission of finding the mother. The ends have been tied together, but Cheung takes a risk, by saying the story’s not over yet for this narrator, that the past hasn’t yet put all of its pressure on the main character yet. Here Cheung flaunts the traditional structure, and digs back into the story, and not as a falling action, but as a kind of comment on how important the past is to these characters and to telling this story!
The wind whistling all around. Suddenly, the window bursts open, and I’m engulfed by a sound that I can feel in the pit of my stomach, a deep thunderous drone: beautiful, like the long, solitary call of a blue whale, but also infinitely terrifying, like the howl of some unfathomable beast, so loud that even the floor shakes.
See how the past and the now of the story dovetail, how they are the same but different due to the circumstances of the time and age of the characters? I love when stories can make their meaning through the weaving of past and present, which can make each part of the narrative as important as the other parts.
My mother listens now, silvery-white hair plastered to her face, enraptured by the haunting harmony of the typhoon barreling as it did a lifetime ago, along winding corridors, between cracks in the walls, and through the room on the sixth floor with the open window.
She finds my hand and clutches it, now and in the past. We listen for a while.
“I’m here, too,” I say.
“I know.”
I love that Cheung wouldn’t let this story end, that he had to see these characters through their shared past and into the present, The storm is important to these characters because of their shared experience from the past. The storm is another character in this story, an antagonist, bringing them together in a way they couldn’t have been brought together by some other event or element.
I love the big risk of that manipulation of time. How writers have a choice about how fast or slow a story moves, that Cheung envisioned them pausing, listening “for a while.” The characters are in control of this narrative. It is their moment and not the writers or even the readers. They get the final word, and though ending on lines of dialogue can be clunky, can ask for too much inferencing from the reader, here, we want them to talk to each other! That’s the message of the story, and it hits like a beautiful final note on a perfectly orchestrated story.
Prompt: Start with the main character attempting to find someone or something that is lost, that has importance to their present and past. Find a way for the present and past conflicts to collide, to weave toward each other, using specific and sensory details of the present, of the setting to make sure we are firmly rooted in this place with this main character, as they wrestle with their past. Parent and child relationships work well for the past colliding with the present, but so do friendships, and rivalries. Build tension by making sure that this is an atypical day/event for the main character.
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I just want to say how fascinating and helpful I find your analyses of flashes - I've discovered your Substack only recently and have been binge-reading this last week. I know nothing of your circumatances, etc., so have no idea if you have time to produce this quality many more times per month. Does everything have to be weekly or twice weekly? Some newsletters, columns - whatever they're called - by other substackers have fallen in quality when they've become more frequent. I suppose the answer is, as you say, to mix in something else that more people would be prepared to pay for. I write here only because I want you to know how much I appreciate what you've shared so far.
A very thorough analysis. I found a lot to take away from it.