Flash Structure: Opening Paragraph
Starting In The Woods
After reading Into the Woods by John Yorke, I’ve been thinking a lot about inciting incidents and where they can take place in a piece of flash fiction.
What is an inciting incident? The story crisis or event that pushes the character out of their normal life and into the woods of the story. Or the answer to why this character at this point in their lives in this setting? Yorke says, “What the inciting incident must also do is awaken desire.” and “An inciting incident is always the catalyst for the protagonist’s desire.”
One way to open a flash is by starting with the inciting incident. In flash, we don’t need or have time to see the “normal world” of the protagonist. Instead, the opening line shifts the reader and the main character immediately “into the woods” of the story.
Here’s an example from “Why We Came to Target at 9:58 on a Monday Night” by Andrew Roe published in Freight Stories.
Donnie remembers just in time. So we run practically every stop sign and red light in town, and get there just before they close. They’re about to lock the front doors but we burst on in like we own the place, the goddamn heirs to the Target fortune, telling the puny Rent-a-Cop Guy, It’s cool, it’s cool, we’ll be real quick, no worries T.J. Hooker.
The characters are literally rushing to the store. These characters have jumped off the diving board, and to mix metaphors, they have entered into the woods of Target. The setting doesn’t have to be alien or otherworldly, but it must function as a place where the characters’ desires are put under pressure to make them act to achieve them! This is not a normal run to Target. There’s an added story context here.
Yorke again, “So the inciting incident provokes the question "‘What will happen?’ and the climax declares—’this’. Inciting incidents, therefore, create the question that will be answered in the climax.”
So if your story is headed nowhere, consider rewriting the opening to get the characters into the woods, acting through or because of their desires to see what happens on the stage of the story or in the scene!
Once, there, the story says to the main character— "You're in a new and foreign world, what will you do? What is your first action? How will you react” (Yorke). This will get us into “the now of the story“ instead of “the before the story”. It will help the writer focus on putting the main character on the stage of the story and keeping them there in scene. The ”before the story” exposition and details can then be ribboned in using just a few sentences only when needed instead of in a giant clump that halts the story before it even starts!
Back to Roe’s flash:
But I’m not laughing as much now, because I’m starting to remember why we’re here, why we came to Target at 9:58 on a Monday night.
I love how these thoughts, this interiority happens while Donnie is making a mess. We're on the stage of the story because we have an active character that the main character responds to internally. The reason that interiority often doesn't work in flash is that it stops the narrative in its tracks when we only have one character, the protagonist thinking instead of acting. Here, her thinking is at least a reaction to the other active character! Donnie is actually making this more “of a wood” by his behavior, his actions. Donnie, by creating ”the woods” has become our antagonist! This is one way to make a more passive protagonist come alive in your story. Give them a reason to want to escape the woods! That can become the protagonist's main desire!
The drive back is quiet. We stop for the lights. We don’t talk. The Vodka Dews have officially worn off. My head spinning like a pukey carnival ride.
Now a direct reversal of the opening! Reversals are one way to build resonance because we get to see the character in two different lights! This reveals more of their personality as well! And we think they are out of the woods, but they're deeper in the woods of their relationship! This pregnancy test and what it could mean has come between them! I love this move at bringing them deeper into the woods. The setting has changed but the emotional fear is still there and getting worse!
So what do you think our odds are? Donnie then asks, braking, guiding us into a left turn, the steering wheel sliding slowly back through his hands. Fifty-fifty?
I stare ahead at the road and the lights and the other cars coming toward us, and I gnaw on my lip so hard it almost makes me cry.
Fifty-fifty, I say. That sounds about right to me.
So we know that flash often subverts typical structures or arcs. This is why I contend that flash has its own systems (okay, rules if that makes more sense?) than just writing a short story in miniature.
Yorke, a screenwriter for movies and TV, would like all stories to focus on the structure of character change. While I think this is important to flash, there are ways that this can be truncated, skipped, or merely whispered at since flash puts implicit trust in the reader to make inferences.
So Roe's story and his narrator's change is more subtle, is asking us to take the evidence from the story, her actions, her desires, and the revealing of their relationship to guess what will happen if that pregnancy test is positive. Even negative may have its inherent consequences for this couple!
I would argue that Roe hasn't brought this to a neat resolution but has left us right at the start of the climax. The answer to our inciting incident is in that test or rather the results of that test! We have to make some guesses! Flash asks the reader to not only be okay with these types of endings but to desire the puzzle of stories like this one! Yorke would argue for an achieved balance by the protagonist's ending, but here we've got the anarchy of a puzzling ending with the reader in charge of guessing what happens next!
But none of this happens if we don't force or provoke our characters to get out of the ”normal world” as quickly as possible and into the woods of the story, where they must act on the stage of the story. This acting is what reveals their character and creates resonance.
You live the experience of the story vicariously through them; when they’re in jeopardy, you’re in jeopardy; when they’re estatic, you are too. `Yorke
Prompt:
Guiding Questions for flash openings
What will entice the reader? (inciting incident, the woods, not normal)
How quickly can you create time and place? (The Woods!)
How do we create scenes that resonate beyond our own lives? (Characters on stage!)
How do we get the character to jump off the diving board? (inciting incident!)
Consider opening with two characters rushing to get somewhere, put them into the woods (setting) of the story as soon as possible. The setting can be familiar but is now changed by the context of these characters’ mission! Have them try to figure something out together, but they use different means to figure this out. Donnie makes a mess while she begs him just to get the test and leave. The main character should be forced to act/react. What happens if these characters have competing desires? Who wins? How are the characters revealed by who wins? Will their relationship survive this winning?
Further Reading: Flash Openings
"The first time a guy said I look like a man was at the Jamba Juice stand in the mall. He was still a boy, probably my age and sticky from adolescence. You look like a man. He said it as if he had the right to say anything to me. As if it was important for his survival, an echo of his ancestors who were my ancestors, long and black and muscled, though we were two strangers holding smoothies.” Smoothies by Venita Blackburn
“My parents are in the backyard, digging their graves. I'm in the kitchen with Orange, my younger brother, and we're watching through a grubby little window.” Syndication by Allegra Hyde
“Ruth knew that dress, she was certain of it: black satin sheath, full-length, with a peacock splaying his obsidian-beaded tail from the young woman's waist to her toes. Even on a grey Seattle afternoon, the dress somehow found enough light to shimmer as the woman wearing it walked down Rainier Avenue.” The Loveliest Thing by Tara Campbell
“After my mother died, my father removed the batteries from every clock in our house, adjusted their hands at the time when my mother was born when she married my father, when she gave birth to me, when she died.” Between Not Much and Nothing by Tara Isabel Zambrano
Try This at Home:
Set a timer for 5 minutes. Write down all the places you have ever been to. Consider starting this list from childhood and moving toward the present. At first, don't focus on any kind of narrative. Just make a list. If you start to have feelings, a pressure, a” hot spot” allow yourself to add details. If those details continue roll with it. If the details stop, continue on with your list! Keep hunting for settings that with the right context become” into the wood” spaces for your characters!
My writing: “We don't have time to be sad, I say, pointing to the pile of tarnished silver. There are teetering stacks of stuff everywhere. Outdated soup cans, the Campbell's label peeling revealing the metal beneath, sacks full of yarn and quilting material, a murky aquarium, and movie memorabilia from the 1950s. The smell of rot and dust, and confinement whisky-ed across it all. Your nose already running, the tote bag from the local grocery hanging stiffly from your other wrist. A long way from those boys stealing candy bars and cough syrup” An Accessory to the Orchestra at Hobart”
In this town, everything hinges on your reputation. Football on Fridays and church on Sundays. And purity in-between. It's not a choice: there's nature and there’s religion, and somehow, we're all expected to be on the right side of these invisible laws, Sunday school lessons running interference.
So when Mandy touches my lips with her finger, pulls at my ear, asks me if she's all I've ever wanted, I tell her I love her for the first time” The Running of Blood at Chestnut Review
Thank you for sharing so many great examples. I’m saving this prompt!
Such great insight, as usual ;) Thank you for sharing this.