Flash
Fiction I was with a group of twelve- to fourteen-year-olds.
We were talking about a short story of mine they’d read and
discussed with my colleague Gabriela Zucchini. This was in Italy
a few years ago. One of the boys, a rather shy twelve-year-old
called Lorenzo Pacchioni, handed me something which he’d writ-ten
specially for me. It was in Italian, which I don’t speak. My
translator, Giuditta De Concini, translated it on the spot.
It moved me so much I asked Lorenzo if he would read out his
original so that everyone could share his gift. When he finished
there was a moment of silence before everyone broke into enthusiastic
applause. Lorenzo had touched a nerve. Here is the English version,
published with Lorenzo’s permission: Can you draw your soul?
I’ve heard many poems about two friends leaving each other.
All of them are very sad. I think the ‘gold’ between two people
who love each other can never end. Looking out from my balcony,
I saw the sunset. I know it may sound banal, but you can see
many things in the sunset, important things for you. Try that
when you are alone, and feeling bored. In so doing, you can
meet anyone. Reading my story provoked Lorenzo to write something
for its author. Eighty-three words were the result. No one suggested
he should do it, or what kind of writing it should be; it wasn’t
a school exercise; no one set a limit of length or language.
He simply wrote what he wanted to write the way he wanted to
write it. When he read it to an audience of strangers and was
applauded enthusiastically, his face blushed from pleasure and
embarrassment. This is a con-flict of emotions every true author
feels after publication. Because then you know more sharply
than at any other moment that what you’ve written reveals, whether
you intended it or not, your secret self – which I call ‘the
essence of your being’ and some people call the soul. I was
pleased that Lorenzo begins his story with a question, which
leads us to the heart of what makes a piece of writing a work
of literature. All writing is in a literal sense drawing. I
don’t know if anyone had said that to Lorenzo, but what he did
in more than only a metaphoric sense was draw one gene of the
DNA of his essential being. The result, though prose, comes
near to being a poem. When spoken in Italian, its lyric quality
sings. It’s dense with meanings the reader has to unpack. It’s
enigmatic and yet at the same time entirely straightforward.
It’s complete in itself, a finished language object, not an
incident or anecdote or fragment. Because no one instructed
him or imposed conditions, we might say that Lorenzo wrote what
came naturally. Naturally to himself as an individual; and naturally
to himself as a twelve-year-old boy. He wrote as an instinctive
author that which he needed to say, not what anyone required
him to say. And it’s very short, presumably because he felt
no need to elaborate or explain, rather as twelve-year-old boys
often don’t. Lorenzo’s microtext is an example of what is now
called flash fiction. This is a kind of composition with roots
that go back a long way but has only recently been identified
as a literary form with its own defining characteristics. I
came across it in an anthology, Flash Fiction, edited by James
Thomas, Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka, published by W.W. Norton
in 1992. I instantly felt two things. That this was a form of
narrative exactly suited to our times. And that I must write
some. But at the time I was busy writing Postcards from No Man’s
Land, and then This Is All. It was only when they were off my
hands, in 2005, that I could turn my mind to work on some flash
fiction. I say ‘turn my mind’ because that’s an accurate meta-phor
for the process. For me, writing a novel is like running the
marathon. It’s a long, hard slog that requires a great deal
of preparation, training, and dogged persistence. It’s totally
absorbing to the exclusion of everything else, because I have
to hold the whole book in my mind, like an object almost so
huge and so heavy to hang on to that it demands all my strength
and concentration if it’s not to slip out of my grasp and crash
in pieces on the floor. A flash fiction, on the other hand,
is like running the hundred-metre dash. Yes, you have to train
for it; and yes it does take concentration. But the writing
requires a quick, short burst of energy. To change the simile,
it’s like a tightly focused brief beam of laser light that illuminates
a particle of life. The key words for success with such writing
are precision and concision. Everything must be exactly right
and be no more than is absolutely necessary: the choice of words,
the rhythm and shape of the sentences and the entire piece,
the selection of detail, the subtleties and nuances that carry
and indicate the deeper meanings. And always what is meant must
be more than what is said. The novel is demanding in a different
way. Carefully employed redundancy, for example, has a necessary
place. By-the-way diversions, counterpointing interjections,
elab-orate descriptions can all be useful in a novel but would
blur the singular clarity of a flash fiction. Because the two
forms are different in their demands, many novelists can’t write
flash fictions, and those whose minds are attuned to flash fictions
can’t write novels. Because I’m thought of, if I’m thought of
at all, as an author of novels, I’ve been asked since The Kissing
Game was published why I’ve suddenly produced a book of short
stories, and especially flash fictions, and whether this wasn’t,
as one interviewer put it, ‘rather a challenge.’ The ‘why?’
is easy to answer: because I wanted to. But was it ‘a challenge’?
I find all writing a challenge. And it gets harder the more
I write. When I asked the interviewer what she meant, she explained
that as I wrote rather long and elaborate novels, she wondered
if I found it easy to adjust to the very short and condensed
form of flash fictions. It wasn’t difficult to make the adjustment,
because, as it happens, my novels are composed of short passages
any-way. In Breaktime and This Is All, for example, the passages
are given titles. In Dance on My Grave they are numbered. My
mind — the way I think — tends to work that way. I don’t think
or speak in long passages of unvarying tone and style. I compose
a novel of passages that are gathered together, arranged and
linked to form a unified and thematically controlled whole:
a story about one or more characters. In a novel I’m interested
in all aspects of the interior and outward life of the character.
In a flash fiction I’m interested in one moment in a character’s
life. Visual artists do the same thing. I’ve always been a fascinated
admirer of Rembrandt. He painted The Night Watch, a huge, complexly
composed oil painting, depicting many people in a dramatic scene
full of (possible) stories. He also drew a very small ink sketch
of a little child taking its first steps on its own with two
adults keeping careful watch. In a few rapidly drawn lines he
captures all the delight and tentative uncertainty of the child,
all the tender attention and pleasure of the two adults. The
one is an elaborated drama — a novel; the other captures a moment
of universal experience — a flash fiction. One reason for the
increasing popularity of flash fictions —and a reason why I
want to write them now — is their suitability for digital publication
on mobile phones, e-readers, tablets, and computers because
their short length fits the screen. They are quick to read and
easy to return to. They appeal to our single-unit, one-byte-and-go
culture. Predictably, therefore, they appeal to young people.
Besides, I knew from my years as a teacher that the short story
of conventional length (about 4,000 or 5,000 words) is perfect
for reading and study in school. But it isn’t an ideal form
for pupils to write. Many professional authors agree it is one
of the most difficult of all the literary forms to tackle. It
requires great skill at succinct creation of character, choice
of images, precision of language and narrative. In a strange
way it is just too long and yet not long enough for pupils to
manage. Flash fiction, on the other hand, seems, like Lorenzo’s
gift, to be what comes naturally to late childhood and teenage
writers. It requires precision and brevity but isn’t so concerned
with creation of character or the weaving together of a complex
combination of images and narrative as with the expression of
one self-contained idea, event, or moment of truth. And to help
pupils learn how it is done there are many examples by our best
writers for them to use as models, to stir the juices of their
imagina-tions, and to get them started. Added to which, the
appeal of writing and publication on electronic devices creates
excitement and motivation. Historically, every time there has
been a major development in the technology of writing, a new
form of literature has emerged and become the most pertinent
to that time and culture. The novel as we know it, for example,
only became possible and predominant with the development of
moveable type and ability to print many pages in a bound book,
which could be reproduced fairly easily at a price many people
could afford. It seems to me that flash fiction will evolve
into a primary narrative form of the future both because of
the development of digital technology and the changes in our
mental processes it is bringing about. My guess is that the
novel will increasingly be composed of very short passages,
using many different kinds of narrative, both fictional and
‘nonfictional,’ which are gathered together in considerable
number and are combined into a coherent whole determined by
a variety of thematic concepts. And we will read them either
onscreen or in paper books, depending on which seems best. At
the same time, my guess is that some of these flash-novels will
be published both onscreen and in printed books, some only onscreen,
ideally on tablets like the iPad, because of the particular,
rapidly developing, exclusive advantages and qualities of digital
publishing, while some will be published only in traditional
books, because of their particular benefits. What these special
attributes might be are still being worked out. That is the
excitement for both writers and readers, and is an exploration
I want to be part of. The new doesn’t necessary kill off the
old, but can refresh it, just as the old has something to offer
the new. Each is necessary to the survival of what we call literature,
which, to use David Daiches’s description in his Critical Approaches
to Literature (Prentice Hall, 1956), is ‘any kind of composition
in prose or verse which has for its purpose not the communication
of fact but the telling of a story (either wholly invented or
given new life through invention) or the giving of pleasure
through some use of the inventive imagination in the employment
of words’. Literature – ‘work of the metaphoric imagination’,
to use Harold Bloom’s potent description – offers us images
to think, feel, and perceive with, and from which we gain an
under-standing of the nature of human life. * A few authors
and examples of flash fictions — Aesop, Fables. — James Thurber,
‘The Little Girl and the Wolf’, one of a number of witty parodies
of Aesop’s Fables, along with other of his flash fictions. —
Franz Kafka. His work, especially Parables and Paradoxes, is
almost a handbook of various kinds of flash fiction – not that
he thought of them in this way: invented stories, dreams, memories,
philosophical miniatures, etc. — Yasunari Kawabata, Palm-of-the-hand
stories. The Japanese are past-masters of this form. — Craig
Taylor, One Million Tiny Plays About Britain. Flash fictions
in dialogue form. — Italo Calvino and Dino Buzzati, two Italian
authors who wrote short fiction of various kinds. — Samuel Beckett.
Numerous examples included in The Complete Short Prose. — Richard
Brautigan. His work is composed almost entirely of discrete,
very short, self-contained pieces that, together, form larger
stories and novels. — John Berger. Some of And our faces my
heart, brief as photos, and Bento’s Sketchbook offer many models
of the form. — Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet. ‘A Factless
Autobiography’ composed entirely of very short pieces. — Elizabeth
Bishop in her fables. Some of: Donald Barthelme, Joyce Carol
Oates, Raymond Carver, Anton Chekov, O. Henry, Thasia Frank,
Guy de Maupassant, stories from Ovid’s Metamorphosis. And a
useful collection: — James Thomas, Denise Thomas & Tom Hazuka,
editors, Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories, WW Norton, 1992.
* This is an edited version of an article first published as
‘Sparks of Fiction’ in the NATE Classroom magazine, Issue 15,
October 2011. A slightly different version appeared in The Horn
Book Magazine, March / April 2012. The Kissing Game, my collection
of short stories, some of which are flash fictions, is published
by The Bodley Head, Random House, in UK, and by Abrams Amulet
Books in USA. My novel, This Is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia
Kenn, published by The Bodley Head, Random House, in UK and
by Abrams Amulet Books in USA is, in part, composed of flash
fictions. Trying It On, available only on my Tablet Tales iPad
app, is a flash fiction autobiografiction. © Copyright Aidan
Chambers 2011, 2012.
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