I sit on a train as I type this. The train lolls from side to side, and people stumble along the aisle to and from the café car. They’re hungry. They want coffee. As they lurch past, they do not swap pleasantries. And neither will I.
Here is what I want to tell you: The Writing Center and I will host a flash fiction workshop in a couple weeks (details below). If you write poetry or fiction and want to explore the territory between the short story and the prose poem, join us. It’s free. We’ll have up to a dozen writers. Some spots are already taken.
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Flash fiction is a mongrel genre, one that resists definition and goes by other names: sudden fiction, small fiction, quick fiction, postcard fiction, microfiction, and the short-short story. Flash has a good deal in common with the prose poem. And flash is arguably the best way for a young fiction writer to hone the craft and get published sooner rather than later.
Which is not to say that flash fiction comes easily. A good flash is as rare and hard to come by as a good poem. Yet flash fiction is booming. Many dozens—probably hundreds—of online journals feature flash fiction. Publishing houses have printed anthologies devoted to the genre. Harper’s Magazine featured a few flashes this summer. So, it’s around.
If you want a firm definition, here’s the best I can do: a short story told in fewer than one thousand words.
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This train passes farms and industrial wastelands, mostly, but from time to time we rumble through a neighborhood. Beyond a tall fence, I glimpse a yard with an empty pool, a three-legged dog, and a shovel. The shovel is propped against an overturned wheelbarrow. Beyond another fence, an old man in pastel-green coveralls blasts the eaves of his house with a garden hose while a younger, much heavier man sits at a picnic table and stares into a toolbox. Another yard, another untold story.
I cannot help but imagine such stories.
A dental hygienist rescued a three-legged dog from a highway median and brought him home. A week later, while she worked late, the dog clawed right through her pantry door and ate every bread slice, burger bun, and cracker. A month later, he took a dump on her freshly made bed. When her new boyfriend came for dinner, the dog got excited and pissed in his lap. This sent the man into a drunken rage. He strangled the hygienist’s cat. She buried the cat in her yard and vowed never to let the dog back into the house. But tonight, when she drives home from work, she will realize the dog saved her from a dangerous relationship. She will open her back door to let him in. He will be gone. Another train will pass.
Wasps have infested the eaves of the house where the old man in pastel stands with his garden hose. His middle-aged son was stung fifty times while spreading insulation in the attic. After gently coating his son’s wounds with calamine lotion, the old man does what he can to spray the wasps away. His son gazes into the toolbox, but he’s not looking for a tool. He’s trying to figure out why, for all these years, he thought his father didn’t love him.
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Flash fiction works like these glimpses into the back yards of strangers. The author sketches a few details and draws the outlines of a story. Then it’s up to the reader to see and feel the rest. Done well, flash fiction evokes deep emotion and powerful insight. Flash can also be funny, of course, and sexy, and mysterious. The genre need not be restrictive. In fact, sometimes I doubt that flash fiction is its own genre at all. It’s a condensed short story. It’s a tightly wound, narrative prose poem. The art of flash is, to some extent, the art of compression and omission. How few words, how few details, how few moments can a story use to convey the power of a larger story-behind-the-text? What can be cut yet remain hovering between the lines?
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In this workshop, we will meet three times. Each participant will write six to ten flashes. We will read and discuss a few of our own, and we will consider the extraordinary work of several published authors. We will compare flash fictions to prose poems and jokes, and we’ll find the form’s roots in ancient parables.
Along the way, we’ll develop our understanding of what works and what does not work in flash fiction. We will analyze the techniques flash fiction writers use to cultivate multiple layers of meaning, and we will experiment with those techniques in our own work. Through guided exercises, independent projects, and timed freewrites, workshop participants will compose several flash fictions and, at the end, choose one to revise with an eye toward publication.
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If you want to read a few flash fictions, here’s a good place to start: WIGLEAF'S TOP FIFTY. If you want to write a few, this workshop will be a fine place to start. Send an email to ericbosse@ou.edu if you’d like to enroll.
[Eric Bosse is a lecturer in Expository Writing. He has published more than forty stories, some flash fiction and some longer, in such magazines and journals as The Sun, Mississippi Review, Exquisite Corpse, Zoetrope, Eclectica and Night Train. His story collection, Magnificent Mistakes, will be released this winter by Ravenna Press.]
Workshop will be held in Wagner Room 280, October 19th and 21st from 6pm-8pm and October 23rd from 2pm-4pm
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