The Power of Flash Fiction

Implication and Inference

Welcome to my ongoing struggle to describe why I love flash fiction and why I think it deserves to be thought of as its own form. In fact, the more I try to compare flash to other forms such as poetry or the short story, the more I get into trouble! I don’t want to malign any forms of writing, but my love and obsession with flash forces me to often drag up from the bottom disparaging comparisons as you’ll see at the end of this second paragraph! And maybe this is why definitions are so hard to write, manage, so hard to agree on. So throughout these letters, I’ll definitely struggle with defining, with labeling, with demonstrating how flash works and/or how it might work for you in your own writing. As far as all writing advice goes, and maybe advice in general, take what helps you, and forget the rest!

But I think we can agree that flash is its own form, with its own sense of rules or suggestions or ways to craft it. I would ask the flash writer to consider the power of implication and inference. The writer through the filtering of details, descriptions, and point of view of the main character implies feelings, tones, moods. Implies a sense of drama, of action occurring on the stage of the story. Action, reaction, choice have more power, more weight than summary, stated feelings, and details that are static.

Writing is a game between writer and reader to see how much the reader can understand implicitly. This is the high-wire act that the flash writer engages in with each sentence. How can they say so much by using so few words?

Details that do not enrich the story by helping to create character, add to the tension, or conflict, and do not add a sense of place are static. Or as George Saunders puts it, “A story (any story, every story) makes its meaning at speed, a small structural pulse at a time.” Implications allow the reader to make jumps in their comprehension. It allows the writer to leave out information, to cut exposition that might over-explain, that would slow down the pace of the writing, which would leave us too much on the surface. A flash is a speeding train, while a short story is a sight-seeing tour. Flashes often leave us breathless while short stories leave us pondering.

What we’re looking for, hoping for is a sense of urgency, a velocity of prose filtered to perfection. The right word, the right detail, a fresh insight into the world the character inhabits, and finally a feeling of worthwhileness, a true feeling, I would call resonance.

Every word counts in such short stories because they must hold up the weight of all the words not used in the story. They must account for the unsaid, must create the unsaid, and provide the reader a chance to make inferences. Think of a puzzle or an escape room: the reader is your teammate! They provide insights and inferences based on the clues given to them by the writer. The shorter the work, the deeper the reader will need to dig into these implications to help form the story.

So how do we find this balance between telling and showing, between naming abstract feelings and letting our reader discover these feelings? One thing that good flash demands is characters making choices. As Charles Baxter says, “A drama requires an opening of the wound.” The static flash is presented by the writer by telling us exactly how the character feels about some summarized or habitual event or ritual. Stories are about breaking rituals, about seeing a character try to get out of trouble or get into trouble, to witness their choices, their actions, and the fallout from these choices. Flash loses its power when the character’s choices are taken for granted, when they are summarized, when they are attached to an abstract feeling.

Often a writer will describe the feeling or thought before the action is put onto the stage of the story or we’ll get the feeling but not the specific details that should evoke the feeling. Feelings should be evoked by action/reaction or details of sensation, otherwise, the reader is told what to feel before the character even feels them. It’s telegraphing the importance of the feeling over the action. It doesn’t allow the reader to see what will be implied by the action or details and it makes it hard for the reader to infer the meaning. This creates distance between reader and character and also creates melodrama or sentimentality because we’re told how to feel instead of intuiting how the character feels or how we might feel witnessing the character on the stage of the story! Usually, this means the writer is ahead of the character or the story and wants to make sure they get the feelings right for the scene or action, but we want this information afterward, not before. Get out of the reader’s way whenever possible!

But even this is abstract without some form of example, and so I don’t want to bother you with my own bad writing, let’s look at some great examples of Flash fiction!

Let’s start with “Good Enough” by Shasta Grant published in Pithead Chapel.

“I heard my daughter was working at Laundry & Tan Connection and hoped it wasn’t true, but when I went inside, the bells on top of the door jingling to announce my arrival, she was standing behind the counter.”

I love how we’re invited into the world of this story by the story occasion. This mother hasn’t seen her daughter in a while; they are estranged, so this is a once-in-a-lifetime meeting. An opportunity for reconciliation, but notice our first-person narrator doesn’t flounder in abstract feelings, doesn’t name this meeting as a chance to apologize. In fact, she wants to hope/pretend that her daughter is doing something better than working at a tanning salon. Can’t you just feel this conflict brewing? This opening gives us an idea of the character, a bit of who she is (spiteful, but hopeful, waiting to make amends, but she probably doesn’t know how), setting, conflict, and the reason for our story! Notice too that this story starts with an action, a choice by our point of view character. Some stories would start with the backstory, telling all of the ways this relationship is broken. Usually, we don’t want that in flash. it’s too static, too telling, too inhibiting on the characters acting!

“Coming here seemed like a good idea, since I was driving through town. That wasn’t exactly true, but it was only two and a half hours in the wrong direction. If I had turned around, I could pretend she wasn’t stuck here. I could pretend that in August she packed her bags and moved to Durham or Keene or Portsmouth with the others.”

Here’s some backstory or as Douglas Glover calls it, “backfill” which I quite like. Backstory has the connotation of length, of depth, while backfill is quick, urgent, ready to get back to the main storyline!

Notice that even in this backfill we are greeted with a choice the narrator has made, how she could have kept her denial, how she wants her child to have gone off to college or a bigger city, to be doing better things! Even here, no mention of abstract feelings. There’s room for the reader's judgment, room for our inferences about her feelings, her motivations!

Then we get to the middle of the story, the moment of crisis for this narrator, and even here she refuses to fall into the mention of emotions.

““No. Can we go somewhere and talk?”

“I’m working. If you came here to see what a failure I am, now you know and you can leave. You know the way out of town.””

By a fantastic mix of present storyline and backfill, we know this woman. her struggle, her selfishness, her desires in this moment, and none of this is mentioned directly. But all of it is filtered specifically and uniquely through her character, her voice, her view of the world.

“I came here to tell her it wasn’t too late, that she could leave this town too, but seeing her behind the counter, I understood she never would.”

But here’s where this gets interesting and less conventional. She doesn’t want to rectify their relationship at all! She wants her daughter to feel the happiness and freedom of escaping as she did so many years ago! This isn’t about motherhood, at least not in the conventional sense. This is about the sacrifices it takes to have freedom, to bet on your own happiness, to give in to selfishness. This is a more complicated scenario and we’re made more awake by it. And so how does a great writer end this story? The narrator can’t or won’t tell her daughter this, and we don’t want to fall into the trap of abstract naming of feelings, so we land on an object. Something to carry the weight between them. One last action.

“My fifteen-minute session was up. There was nothing left for me to do but go. I stood outside, the little plastic goggles still in my hand, hoping she’d rush through the door to get them.”

And because the writer has let us use our inference skills all along and has filtered this story so uniquely through this character’s point of view. We feel something for this mother, we feel something for this daughter. We’re left hanging, deliciously in this moment, knowing that the daughter is not coming out, will never come out.

Here’s a prompt:

Think of two estranged characters, consider why they are estranged, and put them back into a space together. Find a unique setting that makes one of the characters really uncomfortable. Use this uncomfortability to put pressure o the way they filter the details of the setting, the way they talk to the other character. Have the main character want the other character to do something. make this desire unconventional! Consider how the main character might reveal their backstory/backfill to the reader to justify their actions, their desires. Consider leaving the main character holding something at the end, maybe something of value, maybe something worthless. How does the main character shift from this event? How can you imply their feelings?

What I’m reading:

Diane Williams is a master of finding those pockets of truth in sharp observations, each sentence a mini-drama in itself. I’ll admit these stories (?) don’t quite fit the definitions I gave above, as they often leave me pondering what happened and what connections am I supposed to make? But there’s something underneath each of these short-short stories broiling with mystery and abundant life.

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Try it at home:

Next time you’re writing, attempt to leave out all feeling words. Try to imply the feelings through action and the way the character sees the world. Focus on the details and the objects that create this world. How do they help tell the story? How do they add depth to your characters? Here’s a list to avoid:

Hate

Love

Feel

Believe

Mad

Sad

happy

any use of tears

Afraid (This one is probably the hardest)

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