Three Ways to End a Flash Story:

Metaphor, Reversal, Flash Forward

A Sample Essay from the club!

Catching Lightning: A Flash Reading/Writing Club

Week 5: “Don’t mistake me for your crabapple,” by Abigail Williams, Beach Day by Gina Chung, and “Vows” by Kara Vernor

Craft Elements: Endings, Structure, Brevity, Characterization

Three Ways to End a Flash Story: Metaphor, Reversal, Flash Forward

There are so many ways to end a story, and flash may even make this particularly hard because of the lack of words/space that can be devoted to this one piece of the narrative structure. This week, we’ll look at three different endings from 3 different stories of varying flash lengths. Often, what I find missing in stories when it comes to endings is that the character hasn’t made any choices or taken action, so the story hasn’t revealed its true nature to us from this story occasion. Or the story is often one-note with only a sense of the present story and none of the context that shows us why the character is acting this way, what their desires are, and how this event has put pressure on them to act now, usually differently, than they have before in their lives off the page.

A good ending, really, is a taking-into-account of everything that came before. Sometimes – not enough has come before. No bowling pins are up in the air, or not enough of them. The fabric from which a rich ending gets made is supplied in the earlier portions of the story. ~ George Saunders

The essence of writing microfiction is to find the most potent, emotionally charged moment you can that suggests for your reader a much longer, lasting narrative. ~Kathy Fish

What If Endings: Either imagined by the main character for their own life or for the life of the antagonist, has a sense of naivete, the reader has a sense that this hopeful imagining won’t happen. Makes a darker story end on a note of hope. Allows the reader to think about the character in the future due to the reckoning of the story before the ending.

Beach Day by Gina Chung.

And although you will, in a few hours’ time, come back to a dark house where the closets will be empty of your mother’s things, and there will be a note in her handwriting taped to the refrigerator door that your father will not let you read, and although, much later, there will be weeks and months and years when you learn to hate your mother, first, for leaving, and then your father for not stopping her — that is not until later.

For now, remember this afternoon as a happy one. Remember how to purse your lips around the wind and let it play music across your mouth. Remember how it felt to be small and cold and happy on a beach with your father. Remember the way the air tasted, the silence of the snow, the glow of the winter sun. Remember what it felt like to watch the sea turn to diamonds.

Chung almost has a double ending here with a flashforward, detailing the sadness of the future for this narrator in specific details and then a flashback to the present story, but with a reminder to be happy, to have hope in this one moment that broke the ritual of their lives. That the pain is coming, but since it’s their story they can live in this imagined happiness for just a second longer. I love that Chung gives us a sense of both realities, that the flash-forward is centered on specifics and not just the feelings, that we’re invited into both the trauma of the mother leaving and the joy of being suspended in a rare moment with their father. Chung wonderfully balances both plot and emotion and allows the reader to make inferences.

For more information on the club, click here!

Ending by returning to the central image/metaphor:

It can be difficult to find a flash’s ending if the story doesn’t have an object, image, or central metaphor. In this case, the ending often tries to rely on the character’s thoughts rather than heighten language or imagery. Ending on exposition or thoughts can take the reader out of the story by not allowing them a chance to make the final inference about what the character’s life will be like after the story ends! This can often take the reader out of the experience of the story, out of the illusion, and reminds the reader too clearly of the story's artifice. A story’s power relies on its ability to get readers to forget that they’re being told a tale.

Here's the ending to “Don’t mistake me for your crabapple,” by Abigail Williams. (I chose this as the winner of the Bath Micro contest)

One of the things a flash writer can do to build tension and velocity is to put two counter-pointed characters into a setting together and see what happens. These characters do not need to be exact opposites. As Douglas Glover says, “Well, they are not “opposites’ in the sense of antonyms. They are opposite as in opposing actions or intentions; they interfere with each other.”

The husband’s character is created, revealed through her filtered perspective, through her observations in this small moment that stands in for all of these moments in their life together.

When they are tiny, you are tender. You patrol the borders with your slug scissors. You blanket buds when frost threatens like a mother wrapping winter’s child in a warm towel. But they are like me. Their petals will brown. Their bloom will fade. They will need you too much.

Here, Williams pauses the narrative and allows her thoughts to consider the future, a last attempt to provide evidence for what will become of them if he continues to ignore her, if he can’t love her the way he does his plants. The metaphor works because the comparison breaks down, and they become one. She hides her feelings in the talk of what the plant needs. She attempts the unsayable through the medium of plants, which he adores now. We can infer her last hope here to bring them closer together.

Always the shadow of your fork stripes our shoulders.

But is that hope naïve? If even when she gets close to him, it is only in the garden, only as an observer, always shadowed by his escape into the garden? We don’t know everything about these characters, but we know some small but not insignificant things, and through the evidence provided by the narrator, we get to decide if she will ever break through.

Ending by Revising/shifting the opening line: Playing towards a harmony or dissonance from the opening line.

A Flash’s ending often starts after a final escalation or climax, a point where the character is on the precipice of knowing, learning, rejecting, or accepting something provided to them by the pressure of the conflict and their actions to relieve this pressure. Characters often cannot speak this understanding and can’t be self-aware enough to see/feel/understand its magnitude. So, the writer must show this to the reader through image, metaphor, and/or heightened language. The world is shown anew to the character and reader, but through an unspeakable means, a glimmer or clue found in something of meaning from the story itself. There are often breadcrumbs, objects, images, and phrases that can be used again, manipulated, and shown in a new way. Our stories/drafts are often smarter than us, and they probably hold the “something” we need to find our endings.

In “Vows”, Kara Vernor, takes on two separate events and braids them together!

She says she’ll never marry. She’s 18 and wants the open road, wants sex in every United State. She’s sampled only the West Coast, though heavily.

We should do it for fun, her guy friend says. Drive to Vegas, say I do in a chapel with Elvis, get an annulment before the hangover wears off. In lieu of rings, they heat up lighters and brand them into each other’s hands.

Now 43, she drives the four square miles between her studio apartment, her post office job, the laundromat, and the corner market, that brand on her hand on the wheel.

But we can’t end before the last paragraph because it doesn’t fulfill the tension in the opposites made by the title and the first line. Our first lines or opening paragraphs often control the structure and timing of our stories. They start a clock or give us a map toward resonance and conclusion. Is the initial conflict challenged or avoided? Will it end like we think, or will it go in a better, more unique direction?

Now 43, she drives the four square miles between her studio apartment, her post office job, the laundromat, and the corner market, that brand on her hand on the wheel.

Yes, give me that age marker again! Look how time has passed and how much is unspoken in the white space! I’m intrigued to know what has happened in the intervening years, whether she has kept her vows, whether she has gotten any of those younger wants? Answering the questions developed by the opening is often a great way to think about ending a story. Can any of them be answered? If so, how?

Here, our section shows us a glimpse of her life at 43, where she lives, what she does for a job, where she shops, and that tight shot of her finger, the brand still there, but yet no mention of the friend she married in Vegas, no mention of any other lovers or a lover in her life now.

And I love the irony of wanting to have sex in every state and her being tied to a job that services one town, one zip code. She’s stuck, but the mail can still travel. It’s the perfect choice for a job for this character as it reveals so much and adds depth through its metaphor and irony! Both of these elements are necessary to add depth when writing such short stories! They fill in some blanks for the reader without using lots of words or extra scenes!

Prompts:

Create a scene where the main character observes another character important to them. Let the main character risk being vulnerable by speaking to the antagonist and trying to get the antagonist to share in their past, a memory, or something they both can relate to. Find the metaphor that shows what the antagonist cares about and would rather be vulnerable with than the main character. Give the main character several chances to break through the silence, the unsayable, can they connect? If not, how will you show what their future will be like?

Consider how you can use time to show movement or a shift for your main character! Start them young. give them something they refuse to do or refuse to give up and have them break this promise to themselves! How can you make this specific and fresh, unique to your character? Who will be the antagonist? Who will make them break this promise? Then use white space, skip ahead in years, and show us where your character is now! How have they shifted? Is it better or worse? Make sure to use implications and allow the reader to make some inferences!

General Prompt/Questions for Endings:

The hard part! The main goal is to reveal your character as much as possible! What do we not yet know?

Consider returning back to an image/object you’ve used earlier in the story–how can you shift it, manipulate it to show movement or change?

Consider your power dynamics and how you can shift or reverse them in this final paragraph!

Look back at your opening and see if there is something you see now that you didn’t see when you started? How can you frame this, give it meaning, show its opposite, or juxtapose it next to something else like the future or a what if!

Zoom in or out, make sure we know what kind of trouble this character got themselves into, how it will affect the rest of their lives or the world at large!

Another Resource:

https://www.smokelong.com/five-from-the-archive-endings-in-flash/

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