Using Character Intentions to Create Scenes
Haunting objects
Sometimes, a flash can be written where the opening focuses on an object, an obsession or desire to obtain this object, but while this may be the initial conflict, it’s not the deeper conflict the story is concerned with as the story progresses. Starting with an initial conflict is one way that Flash subverts the traditional story structure. Flash often starts with trouble rather than showing or telling us how good the characters’ lives are before the inciting incident. One way to skip this traditional opening is to put characters in action, allowing them to move toward their obsessions immediately. The balance of this action and context is the challenge the flash writer faces each time they open a new story. If the writer doesn’t know the character’s intentions for the scene beyond their nascent desire, the story may come off as one-note, without depth, if it doesn’t find its larger meaning in a simmering conflict that plays to or against this initial story-opening problem. How a writer creates escalations, bursts of tension and energy that puts pressure on the character to act gives a flash its sense immediacy, velocity, and depth.
In her story, “As Solid as an Ashtray and Emits More Smoke,” Edie Meade starts with a young girl’s obsession with an object she’s been warned against touching, of trying to possess it.
It is a cast-iron frying pan filled with cigarette butts. The handle is just the right size for my hand and just out of reach on the freezer. It is an ashtray. That’s all it is, and I don’t want it. “You don’t want that,” Momma has told me many times, so I try not to.
The child narrator’s desires are palpable here. I also love that the object is being used for something it wasn’t made for and how the mother doesn’t explain why the child shouldn’t want it; that the mother is saying it should be a warning enough. Still, the child tells us that “the handle is just the right size,” which is a great way to evoke desire, to show or reveal rather than tell. Notice how perfect the word “try” is here; how we know his ability to leave it alone will be challenged in this story. It is a small but effective initial conflict because it puts pressure on our main character to act, a future action we will empathize with because how often have our desires thwarted our common sense or rules given to us by someone in authority? The camera is tightly focused on the main character’s object of desire and does not pan out to the weather or even the rest of the house. What the camera is pointed at, focused on, gains power by its sheer focus. But Meade understands that the camera, the main character’s perspective, needs to be widen out for us to be oriented to the time and place of the story, for the main character to have more people or things to interact with as they try to ignore their desire to touch or have the forbidden.
Momma is smoking a cigarette and quartering chickens on the top of the deep freezer, where the bloody water runs down yellow, yolkish. She moves the frying pan closer to her when I come near but does not wipe the trickle. I pat the freezer, so cold inside but so warm along this wall, and the chicken water wets me. It is a tight spot at the back of the house where the kitchen meets the back bedroom, where Daddy keeps the fire burning with morsels of tractor tire.
I love that we transition from something the mom always says, in a kind of floating past, to the current scene, how we’re put on the stage of the story by the visceral sensory details of mom quartering the chickens. It’s a seamless move of the camera and story into the scene! We learn so much about this main character through her actions and her willingness to be close to her mother, even amid the muck and the chicken water. Without being told anything, we can make inferences about her curiosity, her willingness to be close to her mother, and that she isn’t squeamish. She is somewhat sensory-seeking and hungers for touch; that warmth is important to her. Notice that great camera move to include the father, to show him separated, that the daughter is interested in his actions as well. Curious main characters can lead our stories toward tension and revelation. In early drafts, we often refuse to follow them, to allow the camera to explore the worlds inhabited by our characters, and we miss opportunities for escalation and pressure, new ways of allowing our characters to find the trouble they seek.
I stand in the bedroom doorway and look in at Daddy, who smiles as if he has just come back from far away. I smile back without anything to say. A brown blanket over the window keeps the room amber-dark all day long, but I’m not allowed in there except to say good night. It’s not time to say good night, so I watch Daddy polish his boots from the threshold. He sits on the edge of the bed, legs crossed like a woman. One leg has a lot of muscle but the other one is thin because he stepped on a grenade in Vietnam. He crosses the thin leg over the top and he can’t feel whether it’s uncomfortable or not. The thin leg doesn’t fall asleep. It prickles all on its own, he says.
Introducing a new character, a place for focus can act as an escalation. George Saunders puts it this way, “We might think of a story as a system for the transfer of energy. Energy, hopefully, gets made in early pages, and the trick, in later pages, is to use that energy.” New characters, new objects, actions, and reactions are this energy, the breadcrumbs that can lead us to different plots, new ways of allowing our characters to act on the stage of the story, and defeat tropes and insignificant sufferings.
Here, the story gains energy from another rule. The father is positioned in the same way as the skillet as ashtray. They have been coupled by the rules. Since it’s not night, all she can do is observe him. She’s positioned away from him the way she is positioned away from the ashtray. It creates a comparison, a metaphor of danger, yet that word doesn’t appear here; we can make this inference. Inferences pull us further into the story, creating depth and resonance. The context for the dad’s possible danger is given to us like a whisper of gossip. The main character thinks she knows why she can’t be near him, but do they really have the capacity to understand his injury and how it has affected him?
A father experiencing PTSD from a war injury and either refusing or not being able to talk or relate to their children isn’t a new story. Still, this story is made anew by the “energy” created here through the desire of the main character to have what they’ve been told they can’t have; by the way, the metaphor of an ashtray and attention from the father has been put in equal positions. Objects that are specific and unique to the characters in a story have a way of making things fresher, telling a familiar story at a slant, and creating new beats of tension and escalation.
On the footboard of the bed, a cut-crystal jewel collects ashes. It’s an ashtray, too. Daddy’s cigarette is burning into a rope of ash all by itself. “Come on out of there,” Momma says, slopping something into the scrap bucket. Her arms have the same goosebumps as the chicken skin. I edge back on the threshold and pull a wet pinfeather from the ruching of my blouse. The facets of the crystal ashtray turn the blanket-curtain light lavender, yellow. If I had my way I would stand at the footboard, the warmth of the fire on my back, and look through the glass at Daddy. But this is as close as I can go until it’s time to say good night.
I love how Meade stays in scene here, how she doesn’t resort to exposition or interiority of the narrator. Instead, she gives the narrator another object to use to show us her feelings, to evoke them, rather than summarize them. Another ashtray, a new way for her to see her father, to try to understand him. Of course, we can infer this desire by her saying, “I would stand at the footboard, the warmth of the fire on my back, and look through the glass at Daddy. But this is as close as I can go until it’s time to say good night.” She intuitively knows that she needs a new way to “see him.” But the rules again forbid this. Some stories might stop here, but our main character, now that she has stated her desire, has to act, has to do something that breaks the usual ritual, or we don’t have a story; we just have a pretty moment. She has to break a rule, the structure has set-up what Charles Baxter calls a “One-way Gate.” “Once a character performs a one-way gate action, she cannot get back to the place she started from because the action changes the fundamental situation…having performed it, you are the person who did that thing.” People who do “that thing” are often more story-worthy, are more interesting, we wouldn’t have gossip without this interest.
How do we signal that a character is worthy of our attention? We give them more space to act, more time for our characters to observe, consider their actions, and try to figure out their choices.
I don’t know why Daddy polishes his boots, but he does it every day. His boots are massive, black, with a hundred eyelets and a mile of laces. Their stiffness helps him walk even if he can’t feel much in his leg. On the sole of his thin-leg boot, he tacked on a wedge of old tractor tire, to make his legs the same length. It helps even out his limp. Daddy polishes his boots with boar-bristle brushes that he keeps in a wooden shoeshine box. His box is full of shoe polish tins, round ones with crimped lids I can open with my teeth. I cannot open the tin of Momma’s sewing supplies, having chipped my tooth trying. Tins are hard to open for a reason.
Another dark, interesting object, another thing to tie to her father, to try to understand its appeal so that she can understand her father better. There are clues here, and I love how Meade refrains the narrator from editorializing, of trying on a false understanding, and how Meade allows the sensory details, the narrator’s observations, to stand for themselves. In fact, this thinking is sensory, active, and leads the narrator to remember another rule, one she has found out through her own struggles. One that functions as another kind of metaphor, that somethings are hard to open.
Daddy hands the polish to me and lets me try. He smiles as my mouth puckers. Then my chicken-water hands slick up the lid and his face darkens.
I love how the Dad breaks the rule, how he invites her in, how since she’s a child trying to follow the rules, she isn’t the one to take the one-way gate action, he is. She getting what she wants! Attention outside of the rules! And since this is a broken rule, she and we aren’t sure what will happen next!
Vietnam is a place, and also a war before I was born. It is located just past the bedroom doorframe. It is as solid an object as an ashtray and emits more smoke. I don’t want it, so I try to leave it alone, forget about it.
Notice the white space between the last paragraph and the next one that gets us back to the present story. Meade breaks a story rule here, falling into thought, a kind of backstory that reaches from the past to the present. Our narrator gets to pause before breaking the rule, reminding us of her lack of understanding, of her fear of what this place, this kind of dark object, Vietnam, has done to her father. We get this spot of rumination because if she could just understand this, she’d have the key to understanding her father in a way that makes him make sense to her. She steps outside of the story, hits pause, and says I was young then, and I’m older now, and I do understand a bit more than I did before, but I have to objectify this idea, this thing, this war, to make it solid, to make it something I understand better, a something I know to stay away from. A tricky thing to pull off, to have our narrators interact with the metaphors of the story, to name it so clearly, how even talking to us from a kind of future, she can’t fix it.
Like many things, shoe polish is bitter and leaves a lasting residue. “Don’t put that in your mouth,” Momma tells me. She pinches her words around the cigarette on her lip and I notice she has moved the frying pan again. In another house, perhaps one that existed before and further away from Vietnam, it would be a child’s toy, perfectly sized for cooking pretend eggs. But in this house, it is an ashtray.
Another rule, another separation from the mother, a separation from the father by the time the story takes away from him in this paragraph. A subtle shift, one we might not even notice but hopefully feel. We want to get back to the narrator’s interaction with the father, but the mother has interrupted this! This is a great way to use one character in a triangle to keep the other characters apart; this apartness creates tension, and tension keeps us reading. The image of the pan as an ashtray moves and morphs through this short piece, showing us that the narrator may not fully understand her father but that something has been passed on to her from this moment on. And some stories would end here, with the full change of the object showing us a new understanding of the character, even if it’s not named. But she is not out of the woods yet. The father is there, his invitation of breaking the rule of talking to him before saying goodnight is still alive here.
I wipe the tin on my blouse until the kiwi on the top is bright. The black crescent in my ruching won’t come out, though Momma will try. I return the polish to Daddy’s palm and calm returns to the facets of his face.
Notice the small action of cleaning the tin before passing it back. There’s harmony in this action with the father’s careful tending to his boots. An action that shows the father that she wants to understand. Another story might have the main character run away to keep the tin, to be close to the father through theft, but she passes it back, allowing herself to be closer than normal, and she has affected her father in such a small way, but she has given him “calm,” and she has “return[ed] this to him. A small invitation, a small breaking of the rules, brings her closer to her father, and there’s resonance here without hyperbole, without much irony either.
This story is rich with objects, rules, and small but important interactions with the narrator’s parents, all fueled by her desire to get attention, the attention a means to understand a father despite a past that has changed him that she can’t fathom.
And here’s Baxter again, speaking about the power of images, especially those reaching for a new meaning. “…something that escapes meaning, the imagery will then stick to the reader, and begin to haunt.”
I might never think of an ashtray, a pair of military-style boots, or a tin of shoe polish the same again. This is a story that lingers.
Prompt: Write a story with a child narrator, one that is trying to understand something big about another character. Use objects and rules to create imagery, movement, and tension. Allow your character to show their feelings by evoking the moment/scene. Keep them close to the person they are trying to understand! let them break the rules or have the antagonist invite the main character to break one of the rules. How does this create a one-way gate for the MC? Find a central metaphor in either one of the rules or one of the objects, let it’s morphing add weight, pressure on the main character to act, to go for their desire, for them to take a step toward understanding! Bonus points if you can find a paragraph that allows the older narrator to show us if they’ve ever understood any of this? Keep the moment alive for as long as possible, and find a way toward understanding, toward an equilibrium.
Flash I Love:
More Stranger by Jennifer A. Howard
Trebuchet by Avitus B. Carle
On AM Radio by Eric Scot Tryon
Razia, Razia by Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar
Try This At Home:
Find a flash that you love and reread it. Mark the places where you were affected, where you felt something, and where you asked a question. Note what the writer was doing and what craft element or move they made. Try to use that craft element or craft move in a piece of your writing. Did it also make you feel something or notice something about your character?
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Lost in the Woods: Writing Immersive Settings in Flash Fiction Zoom Seminar
Seminar is on Saturday, May 4th, 2024
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Join writer Tommy Dean for a generative writing session focused on creating dynamic and immersive settings for flash and microfiction. We’ll look at model texts and get inspired by writing prompts. Participants will have the opportunity to start 5-6 drafts during this session.
Is This How It Ends?
Wednesday, May 22, 2-4 pm EST
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Join writer Tommy Dean for a two-hour generative writing session focused on finding the perfect ending for several flash pieces. We’ll look at model texts and use prompts for different ways to end a flash piece. Participants will have the opportunity to start 5-6 endings during this session. I’ll also provide my Endings Handout with even more example flashes!
Email me at thomasrdean13 at gmail.com to sign up!
10 Week Independent Flash Mentorship (Starting August 2024)
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Participants will receive bi-weekly lecture notes and handouts, analysis of key story examples, and prompts to inspire new drafts, as well as check-in by the mentor. Optional reading lists are tailored to each mentee.
Weeks 1-2: Definitions and Opening Paragraphs
Weeks 3-4: Point of View and Characters
Weeks 5-6: Plot and Structure
Weeks 7-8: Putting It All Together
Weeks 9-10: Revision and Submission Strategies
Critiquing schedule: Consists of in-depth line comments and suggestions, including things working and things the writer will want to consider revising.
Pre-work packet: 10 pages
Week 4: 10 pages: Revision or new drafts
Week: 6-7: 10 pages: Revisions or new drafts
Week 10: Letter of strengths and things to work on
Zoom Meetings: 30-60 minutes each
Week 1: Welcome/Writing goals/Schedule set-up
Week 3: Discuss 1st packet
Week 6: Discuss 2nd packet
Week 9-10: Discuss 3rd packet
