Setting as Antagonist:

From background to foreground, settings that add pressure

One of the hallmarks of a coming-of-age story is the passage of time, and how the narrative structure conveys the progression of time, highlighting the role of time as a factor in conflict. Coming-of-age stories, especially those told through the flash fiction form, use time and movement as the antagonist. There may be other characters putting pressure on the main character to act, to change, to fight for the balance of their innocence, but it’s time itself that puts the most pressure on these characters. These stories have universal appeal because we’ve all been affected by the movement of time and the pressure this puts on our lives. But because the trope of coming of age and the loss of innocence is pervasive through great stories and mediocre ones, the writer has to come at it with a different angle, with specific and concrete details filtered through a highly engaged character to make these plots new and fresh for today’s bombarded readers.

I want to look at two stories one a longer flash and the other a micro, each using the anaphoric refrain of “It’s the year” and “It was the year of” to establish not only the specific setting, and time of this coming of age, but also the structure of paragraphs, each story a kind of ladder of passing time.

The micro is “Dendrochronology” by Tara Laskowski, which I analyzed in this Substack before, but I’m bringing it back up because it pairs so nicely with “The Year of The Flood” by Sudha Balagopal.

Both stories focus on those early high school years, and give us specific details about what happened that year, how each dip into love, sex, relationships, and the possible danger lurking from people, boys and men especially, but also nature in the form of a tree or from the Ganges River.

Flash and microfiction work best when there is something lurking in the unsaid, in the white space between sections, paragraphs, or even the periods between sentences. Readers of this form are astute at looking for deeper and often secondary meanings behind each word, sensory detail, object, or the repeated mention of these throughout brief narratives. In “Dendrochronology,” it is the tree and its rings, and how the destruction of nature is often the backdrop of the loss of innocence, and sometimes violence and danger. While in “The Year of The Flood”, the Ganges River and its probability of overflowing is always lurking, always ready to take from these characters who live in its shadow, who must like death, but it far away in their minds while they long for love, and the objects of teenage obsession, and how impermanent these objects are, and what they say about the impermance of love as well.

“The Year of The Flood” starts and ends with the danger of the Ganges River flooding, juxtaposed with “The year we fall in love with love.” This juxtaposition is subtle, yet it combines fear and danger with love, illustrating that love is more than a static emotion. It can lead, over time, to redemption, but also evoke a sense of loss. Consider how you put together your paragraphs, especially your openings, and how you can start thinking about what image, object, or feeling you may want to return to in your ending. Dovetailing or even creating opposing feelings and actions in the opening and endings of flash fictions can develop a sense of movement, a sense of time, that we usually connote through pages and pages of stories; here, we do it in only three pages or less. It is the flash writer’s sleight of hand to make the reader feel as if they have spent a large amount of time with a character, with a story, though there were only one thousand words of text.

“The Year of the Flood” like “Dendrochronology” makes sure that each new paragraph or section is an escalation from the last, making sure to use sensory details to help us imagine the brief flashes of scenes, how each little action, conflict can add tension, can have a deeper effect on the characters and readers as we move through the stories, being pull further into the scratch and claw of these character’s and their obsessions by that repeated phrase “It’s the year…”