I’ve talked before about how flash stories often have to cut out the normal part of a character’s life and get the character “Lost in the Woods” from the opening sentence. You can find that substack here! I don’t want to rehash what I’ve already said, but I’m kind of obsessed with this notion of getting flash started in the most direct and dramatic way and adding context and backfill later. Hopefully, in a ribboning approach with a line or phrase mentioned only when we absolutely need the information to continue into the story. For this letter, I thought I’d highlight several flash/micro openings that help us slip right into “the woods of the story” as there are a variety of ways to do this!
First, we’ll look at “Beach Day” by Gina Chung.
One clear winter’s day in your childhood, it was your father, not your mother, who picked you up from school. “Where’s Mom?” you said.
“She’s visiting family,” he said. And then he said, “How about the beach?” and you were young enough to be pleased rather than disturbed by this deviation in routine, and so you went.
All we need to slip into a different day, and therefore the reason for our story is a change in who picks up the narrator and main character of this story. The schism from normality for this character is enhanced by the use of the 2nd person point of view. It’s almost as if the MC needed to shift their point of view in order to view this story from outside of their child's understanding. The reader already starts to feel the dread here because we know the father is likely lying. That increases our sense of dramatic irony which increases the tension. And nothing has happened except for a change in schedule, the change in who picks her up, and that they visit the beach in the off-season. Tension creates urgency, and here it’s a quiet action, but it has the potential to be quite dramatic!
In “The Old Baby” by Elizabeth Crowder we start in the thrush of grief from a miscarriage/stillborn. Knowing how or where to start a story is always a unique challenge. How do we start in medias res and find a way to add context once the rocket ship of the story has already blasted off? Crowder challenges us to catch up!
The old baby splits my wife like a papaya, his only cry a keen. We drift past unused artifacts new with tags: newborn onesies, saccharine plastic toys, the old baby’s name hand-painted in cranberry on the nursery wall. When the casserole people arrive, they place hot dishes on our doorstep like flowers at a roadside memorial.
Notice we don’t get to know this couple as the pregnancy progresses. We don’t spend time with them to reveal their characters and their relationship. Crowder drops us swiftly into the center of their grief. We’re allowed the sensation of being just as lost as these characters. There’s no dramatic irony used here. There’s not much distance either. We’re on the stage with them immediately. I love how this segment almost works as a story by itself—in miniature. It’s hard to shrug off this opening, and not want to know what happens to these people.
This idea of starting with the character “lost in the woods” in the opening, works well when using fabulism a well. Veronica Montes’ story "The Sound of Her Voice” begins with the wife’s voice creating weird and uncanny things to happen to her husband’s face.
It happens when she speaks. Her husband’s face disassembles itself, and the pieces do not slide back into their proper slots until she stops making sounds. Sometimes she forgets and a single word escapes her—a word like “no” or “when”—and her husband’s left eye migrates to the right side of his forehead for a moment. She cannot bear to see him out of sorts in this way.
This might read like backfill or exposition, but it centers me directly into the problem, the story occasion, that it feels very active and affecting to me! Exposition can read actively when given the specific and concrete details that create specific and unique worlds and characters. This situation is so out o the normal that it gains a larger power than the typical exposition you might find in a novel or a short story. This information is the story! And we have to figure out how these characters will try to solve this problem! We’re excited to get lost with these characters!
Prompt: Let your characters get lost in the world of their stories immediately. Don’t prep the reader by explaining the normal day or normal process! Put us in the rocket ship after it’s already reached the edge of the atmosphere of the story! Save context for the last thrilling second and only fill us in when necessary or needed! Let your characters burst onto the stage and let them act. Let others characters bristle at this action and react in opposite ways. Put your characters in new, different situations, ones they’ve never been in before! Let the world morph, providing them challenges and rarely solace! Quietly or loudly, led the tension guide you into deeper conflicts!
Try This at Home: Take a typical event and put it in a new setting. A high school graduation in a monster truck arena, a christening in a YMCA pool, a birthday party in the middle of a corn field. Focus on using the images that come with the new setting and see how they apply to shaping these characters, this event now that it has been put in a new, but unexpected setting. Let the images guide the story to create an experienced story more than the characters making choices.
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