Flash Fiction

Flash fiction, or postcard fiction, is a genre of fiction with a short word-length limit, usually under 500 words, but sometimes under 250 words or 1000 words, depending on the source.

This genre of fiction requires attention to detail and a willingness to compress experience. Short fiction is not easier to write than long fiction, at least for most people. Excess, a sin in some artistic orientations, is nearly impossible in flash fiction. The brevity of this genre makes it attractive to periodical and web publishers.

Finding flash fiction online is not difficult; I suspect the Internet has made flash fiction attractive because of the interest in blogs (which usually have short entries). There is now a national day in the UK (with a contest). A writer for the Guardian chronicles his attempt at generating a series of short short fiction (and he does quite well).


I have downloaded an app called Flash Fiction Prompter that generates prompts. Nothing about the generator makes the prompt more amenable for very short fiction only, but it works. I gave it try and wrote a 250-word story.  I gave my iPhone a shake and got these results:

Character: Male Stripper
Setting: Church
Plot: A character's son or daughter is recruited into a  [the plot description ends here]


 ____

Off the Guest List



Enterr didn’t hear about his son Melvin’s wedding until the day of.  His boss Gina was chatting with him in the break between his nooner routine and his teatime routine, and she said she noticed a wedding announcement in the paper. (She did crossword puzzles.)

"Can't be too many people out there with the last name 'Here,'" Gina told Enterr.

Enterr immediately called a cab and went to the Church of God's Children. The church was in an old strip mall next to a tattoo parlour. The doors were locked.  “So, it is a cult after all,” Enterr muttered.

 He waited outside until the doors opened. The first people out were his son Melvin and a woman Enterr didn't recognize. Both wore white robes. A small crowd of guests in church attire followed, throwing rose petals.

"Mel!" Enterr shouted.

Melvin turned around and saw Enterr. Melvin's mouth dropped open.  The guests stopped throwing petals and stared.

Enterr looked down.

He was wearing his teatime costume: a tophat, an unbuttoned tuxedo jacket and bowtie over a sparkling mesh t-shirt with bell-pull tassels sewn where his nipples were. He wore spats with black sequined socks and garters that went up to the tops of his legs, held up at the waist by a silvery belt. He wore a tiny black thong.

After a long silence, Melvin said, “Well, at least you wore a tie.”


___

A legend has arisen about Ernest Hemingway having written the world's shortest story (see snopes.com about it). To see some flash fiction with less controversial authorship, see http://flashfictiononline.com/main/

Consumption

I have been writing and entered a contest. The work of creating is time-consuming, and it has consumed this corner of my life and crowded out this blog. But creating is a good way to consume time.

Quentin Tarantino

I watched the Golden Globes with some people last week. While Quentin Tarantino was giving his acceptance speech for best screenplay for Django Unchained, one of the group said, "So why is Quentin Tarantino giving a screenwriting lesson during an acceptance speech?" Someone answered, "Because he's super-intense and super-serious about filmmaking."

I don't know a great deal about Tarantino, but I admire him for his intensity towards his art. His films demonstrate a keen knowledge of film genres, particularly B-Movies and pulp, such that his films incorporate those genres even when they borrow from other genres (westerns, martial arts films, war pictures). Arguably his films' use of violence is a kind of popular pandering to people who like to see violence for its own sake, but his films do other things too that I admire a great deal.

For example, he is not afraid of long scenes. Indeed, he seems to love them. Long scenes are difficult to do, for they have the potential to slow down the pace of a film to a point that many film viewers cannot tolerate. Yet in his long scenes, he can explore aspects of psychological and social realism. In addition, his long scenes are usually moments of extraordinary drama. Some filmmakers (and artists of narrative in general) avoid representing important dramatic moments. Scenes where characters confront each other over important issues are easy to portray with too much sentimentality or cliche. That is because such moments are often very uncomfortable to write because the stakes are high. Some writers think that high-stakes moments are impossible to represent well, and therefore they avoid writing them at all.  Tarantino, however, works very hard on his long scenes, and he makes sure that his actors are competent enough to maintain their character throughout the long scenes.

In Inglorious Basterds, Christoph Waltz, who plays Nazi colonel Hans Landa, is the centrepoint of a remarkable long scene at the film's opening. Waltz's character visits the home of a family who is harbouring Jews. Everyone knows that Jews are in the basement--the audience, the family, and Waltz's character (he feigns ignorance, though weakly). The scene is excruciating: if Waltz finds the family in the basement, Waltz will likely kill the lot of them. Waltz's seeming gentility is surprising, yet no one is fooled by him. The trope of the genteel yet cruel Nazi is too common, perhaps. Indeed, the film seems to acknowledge that cliche. Tarantino, however, goes much further than other filmmakers in allowing Waltz the time to represent what such a person might be like. The question is not whether or not Landa will find the Jewish family, but how horribly things will go for everyone once he does. Just how cruel is this charming man? That is the question that the film offers up. The promise of extreme violence lies in wait for many minutes. When the violence comes, it is not a surprise, and it is over very quickly.

For the rest of the film, all other scenes with Landa have that promise for violence--yet Tarantino does not always let the violence loose. He allows Landa to be charming in many cases, enough to make the audience wonder what Landa's goals are--can he really be a good guy in disguise? The answer is no. If people like Landa, it's because he seems to be the brightest, liveliest person in the film, with the exception of his counterpart, Shoshanna, who escapes from the house and works a long game of revenge. 

His film fantasy goes further than most other war films--it gets rid of Hitler in spectacular fashion, but it also defies the war film genre.

An American war film that has two non-American main characters, Landa (a Nazi!) and Shoshanna (a Jewish woman who loves film!) is extraordinary. After Shoshanna gets what she wants by manipulating the expectations of the film audience, she burns to death. Tarantino toys with generic expectation, and her death typifies this defiance.

Losing Faith in Own's Own Creativity

It's possible to lose faith in one's own creative ability. The loss of faith can arise in different ways and last for different periods of time. Some artists never really believe in themselves and yet continue to create. Others lose faith after receiving negative criticism from an audience, critic, friend or family member. Others become dissatisfied with their own creations or with their low productivity or low publication rates.

The beginning of a new year is a good time to reassess one's loss of faith. Knowing that not all artists have creative self-confidence may help one carry on with creative activity.

To re-emerge after a period of stasis may be difficult, especially if that stasis derives from one not believing in one's creative ability. Simple creative exercises may be useful as first steps toward reanimating one's creative life.

A Visit from the Goon Squad and Point of View

I am reading Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad and have noticed that the novel uses point of view in an unusual way. Current wisdom says that a writer should not switch point of view in the middle of a section. That is, point of view in a third-person mode should be third-person limited omniscient rather than omniscient. Egan goes against this current wisdom. Although her text tends to be limited omniscient within sections (chapters or divisions within paragraphs), once in a while point of view shifts in the middle of a section.


I am not sure what to think about this. The book won the Pulitzer Prize, so I would categorize it as literary, but I tend to view breakers of the limited omniscient rule to be older writers (nineteenth century and earlier) or nonliterary: weak writers or writers of formula fiction.

Perhaps this rule of keeping a point of view stable is unnecessary. Furthermore, Egan's book breaks all kinds of rules (genre rules, chronology rules), so that the nonstable point of view is just one of many experiments. Arguably these point- of-view shifts are a sign of a possible negative criticism of today's standard approach to narrative point of view.

The book's shifts in time and its multiple characters can be confusing at times--people who like realist narratives would find the point of view and time shifts distracting, gimmicky and ultimately unnecessary. I still recommend that writers not shift point of view within sections. Each section can have its own point of view, though. Multiple shifts in point of view is risky, so writers who use it must be aware of the risk and perhaps be clearer in other areas (setting, time) to help readers keep track of the narrative's overall arc or theme.

It's fine to break the rules, but the rule breaking needs to have a reason; Egan's book is about memory and the fragmentation of lives, so the rule breaking makes sense.

Writing Exercise: Abstract to Concrete

Concreteness leads to specificity; in writing, concreteness usually means representation of sensory inputs.

Here is an exercise in concreteness.  Take an abstract sentence and increase its concreteness word by word. Do this in several stages, so that the next sentence is more concrete than the first.

1. The structure had negative qualities.

2. The building was inadequate.

3. The house was too small.

4. The bungalow had too few rooms.

5. The white bungalow had only four rooms.

6. The white square house next door had four rooms--a kitchen, a bathroom, a sitting room and a bedroom; the basement was a dugout for the furnace and a small storage room. Six people shared these rooms.

7. The Callaghans lived in a dingy white one-level house next to the abandoned gas station at the end of our block. The house had four small square rooms--a kitchen, a bathroom, a sitting room and a bedroom; the basement was a mere dugout for the furnace and a small storage room. Mr. and Mrs. Callaghan slept in the bedroom with the two youngest children, while my friend Peter shared the flowery-print sofa bed in the sitting room with his older brother Matthew. Peter claimed that everyone except himself and his little sisters snored; even the Alsatian and the tabby, who slept at the foot of his and his brother's bed, snored.


Concreteness leads to more words and to more personality.

Creativity in One's Life

Creativity means thinking of new ways to achieve a goal or communicate an idea. In that sense, creativity is a key part of everyone's life. This definition of creativity is broad, but its broadness arises from the centrality of creativity in people's lives.

Artists depend on creativity for a large portion of their productive output--the word creativity has the word "create" as its root, after all, which just means "to give birth to."

Not all births are big births, I would say. An artist has to think seriously about creating, though at times self-consciousness can be prohibitive. In that sense, thinking of creativity as normative rather than abnormal is both realistic (true) and useful (conducive to production).

Art may at times have a bad reputation, but creativity rarely does. Some people resist the idea of experimental creativity--extreme newness that threatens tradition. In the Western world after Romanticism, extreme newness became associated with all artistic creation. I am in favour of experimentalism--I like the avant-garde--but not everyone needs to go that way to agree with the value of creativity.