SUNDAY, 4 AUGUST 2024

I recently rediscovered flash fiction. I first came across it when I was living and working in Singapore in 2016, had a go at writing a few pieces, but assumed they had got lost in my move to Portugal a few months later. Several weeks ago, however, I found them on a USB. So I dusted them off, rewrote them a little, and am now trying to sell them to various magazines.

There seems to be little agreement about what exactly constitutes flash fiction, other than it’s shorter than standard fiction, and a host of names have emerged to differentiate various word-limits: micro, flash, short shorts, and so on. From my trawl of Google, it seems that below 1500 words is often chosen as the point at which a short short becomes a piece of flash. I would personally go stricter than this and place the cut-off at 1000 words at most. My stories from Singapore were around 300 words, except for one which clocked in at slightly double that.

Over the last year I have also written several stories for a short-story writing competition I enter quarterly, which often has a limit of around 900 words, but I’ve tended not to think of these as flash fiction because they still contain elements of plotting and characterisation similar to those you might find in a standard short story. Overall, I feel that as the count goes below 500 words, the things I talk about in this essay grow more essential and a different genre of literature begins to emerge, whereas, in my opinion, the ‘normal’ rules of fiction start to kick in at around 1000 words. So the space between 500 and 1000 is a bit of a grey area.

During my Google search, I came across many websites arguing that two essentials of flash fiction were a pared-down plot and a restricted list of characters. Certainly the traditional whodunit seems out of the question, but must flash always be so skeletal? In flash fiction, it is true, everything must be established almost immediately － setting, mood, characters, storyline － with little opportunity for subtleties and extra layers to be added later. I will briefly look at these four elements in turn in the rest of this essay. I have to say, though, that I am not at all confident that what I write here will be universally relevant to the writing of flash fiction or whether it will merely reflect my own individual practice.

With regard to setting, there is clearly no time in flash fiction for Hardy’s leisurely descriptions of nature or the meticulous detailing of furniture and rooms that Chandler delighted in. In flash fiction the simplest of statements usually has to suffice to establish all that it is necessary for readers to know: the action takes place in a hospital ward or a school playground or a street. This detail tends to come very early, often in the first line, so that readers can immediately feel secure within the setting and place themselves mentally in that space. I can imagine a flash fiction which consists of nothing but dialogue for the first half of the story － something similar to Hemingway’s The Killers (although even there the first line tells us we are in ‘Henry’s lunchroom’) － but I suspect a story that happens nowhere in particular － Waiting for Godot: (‘A country road. A tree.’) － will rarely work well in flash. So the setting will often be somewhere commonplace with which the readers are familiar so that they can fill in the details for themselves. Keep it simple seems the obvious advice for writers of flash fiction as far as setting is concerned.

Mood must also be quickly established, by a combination of factual information about the setting with a choice of words that sets the mood, often by means of a single adjective － trees become ‘skeletal’ or ‘lush’, rooms ‘bare’ or ‘crowded’, beaches ‘remote’ or ‘hectic’, and so on － thereby killing two birds, setting and mood, with one stone. As I argue later in more detail, I feel there are many similarities between writing poetry and writing flash fiction, and this spare use of descriptive adjectives is an essential tool to set the mood when there is a severe limit on word count.

The introduction of several characters in depth is almost impossible in flash; there is simply not enough space to do this without confusing the reader and risking the focus and intensity of the writing. So there will often be only one main character, and he or she will be introduced very early in the story, usually in the first line, with the author making clear that this is going to be their story. (If first-person narrative is used, other snippets of information about the character may be slipped into this first sentence that immediately begin to fill out the first-person speaking.) If there are two main characters, and the story is essentially a dialogue between equals, both will be mentioned early, and some background information will generally be supplied about their relationship (whether they have just met, are old friends or lovers, boss and employee, and so on).

The literary equivalent of movie extras, walk-on characters, is possible, but they tend to be anonymous and tangential to the main action. They will rarely be given names (because this sends a message to the reader that they are important as individuals in some way, while they are not) and are usually reduced to a function (e.g. ‘the waiter’). Stereotyping will come into play here: for example, the waiter may be quickly shown to be French and supercilious, since English speakers believe we know that all French waiters are supercilious. This adds some colour to the picture without risking sending the work off on a tangent or in a different direction altogether. Flash is therefore well suited to satire and parody and irony since even more than most fiction it relies on a reader’s preconceptions about people, which can then be used for a quick injection of detail or humour. It is much less well suited to subtle portrayal of fully rounded individuals in social groups and situations (e.g. real French waiters).

Obviously there is not much room for complex plotting in flash fiction but this does not necessarily mean that plot is absent or even necessarily hugely truncated. All the same, the writer will need to find ways of including the plot in the most economical way. A plot takes time to unfold in a story if it follows a traditional, chronological ABC, but this amount of time can be reduced if it is introduced by means of the main character remembering the past or reflecting on the situation in which they find themselves, and in the process identifying and focusing on the most important past facts and moments for the reader’s benefit. This is similar to the use of flashback in film: an interesting switching between time frames that not only tells the story in a swift and concentrated fashion but can also pique the interest of readers through variety and a more imaginative unfolding of the plot.

On my trawl through Google, I found people who felt that a good flash story should finish with a sudden, surprising twist, but in my opinion this kind of ace up the sleeve can easily be overplayed. First, creating a genuinely surprising ending that also somehow seems inevitable once it happens requires immense skill on the part of a writer, who must insert tiny clues throughout the story, sometimes even in as little as single words, which the reader brushes past and doesn’t even notice on first reading, but then feels rather dim not to have spotted. Second, it does not take long for brilliant endings to become clichés. For example, the murder mystery in which one of the murdered characters turns out not to be dead (perhaps first used in And Then There Were None/Ten Little Indians by Agatha Christie?) was a coup de grace, but readers get cute very quickly and this kind of coup rapidly becomes just another cliché and a yawn. Third, if readers expect a surprising ending and then one doesn’t arrive, they may feel cheated or disappointed. Yet the actual simple ending may be the best way by far to round off a perfect little tale.

I have personally found that a radical change in mid-story can work well, where the reader has been led to believe that a certain situation exists but suddenly the reality turns out to be different. Readers then need to quickly readjust their thinking mid-stream, which puts pressure on them but can also create a feeling of novelty and pleasing surprise. In my opinion, this may come across as less contrived than the sudden, dramatic final twist, while also keeping readers on their toes. Another useful possibility is to imply, but not directly state, certain aspects of the story (sexual abuse is a classic example), so that readers need to keep these possibilities in mind but never feel confident that they are not making a leap they shouldn’t make. Keep it simple gives way here to keep them guessing.

A common pattern I have noticed in my own flash stories, although I am unsure whether this is merely the way I write or something that may be a more general feature of the genre, is a slow ratcheting up of tension as the main character’s fears slowly grow or the situation gradually worsens. This avoids sudden lurches of plot which may be hard to pull off in such a restricted number of words, and is a way to keep the focus on the main character and the overall situation, while preventing a feeling of stasis, thereby retaining and building tension towards the story’s climax.

One thing that intrigues me and appeals to me about flash fiction, especially once it slips below the 500-word mark, is that it seems to operate in a space somewhere between fiction and poetry in the sense that every single word must pull its weight, and so concision is essential in both forms. (Although I’m not sure that some contemporary poets regard concision as a desirable quality in poetry any longer, since they often seem happy to write as if they were journalists getting paid by the word.) Those adjectives and adverbs we all use and frequently overuse as writers must be ruthlessly expunged from flash fiction unless there is an absolute conviction that they add something significant to the cooking pot.

Another feature of poetry －the ability to say two things (or even more) at the same time in the same stretch of language － is also a highly desirable quality in flash. Thus flash writing is often rather elliptical and I am personally of the opinion that symbols play a more central role in flash than in other forms of fiction. Realistic fiction, which slowly builds up a replica of everyday life, a mirror of nature, takes time to develop its effects, time which is not available to the writer of flash. It is often the very ordinariness of language and scene, the mundanity of the everyday life portrayed, that slowly draws the reader into a story written in a realistic genre. Central symbols can have their role in realism － Ibsen’s wild duck or Chekhov’s cherry orchard － but these act almost subliminally, subordinated to the mimesis of social life. In fiction of normal length, the characters take over the story and have a life of their own, and there is less space, or need, for symbols. Sometimes, in many ways, the characters become symbols themselves. In the restricted space of 500 words, on the other hand, it is harder for characters to dominate, whereas a central symbol can easily perform the role of being the very heart of the writing, its essential meaning, as is true in poetry.

This makes me wonder if flash could be a good home for surrealism. I am not talking about fantasy here, because although fantasy clearly isn’t ‘real’, it tends to be heavy on plot (good versus evil, and so on). I am talking rather of disparate items that have no obvious connection to each other but somehow feel correct when placed together, as in much surrealistic painting and writing. (Note to myself: I must give this one a try.) So while modern fantasy stories à la Harry Potter might not thrive under the conditions of flash, one obvious area where flash fiction can succeed, and has clearly succeeded in the past, is that of fairy tales and fables, such as those collected by Grimm or written by Aesop, which are often very short in terms of word count.

Finally, let me turn to the role of the reader in flash fiction. It seems to me that he or she has a far more active role which requires a lot of work and a sensitivity to language in a genre where this is paramount and where the tiniest of hints, cloaked in veils of language, can move the story on, doing the work that entire paragraphs might be called upon to do in longer realistic fiction. Whereas readers can miss out whole passages or even chapters in longer fiction and still be fully aware of what is going on, they need to be much more attentive when reading flash. They are often required to paste the story together for themselves using subtle clues half-hidden in the writing. For me, a good flash fiction will offer up a lot on the second reading that isn’t noticed on the first.

So although I am prone to ranting about modern life with its pointless speed and its short attention spans and its superficiality of clicking ‘Like’ on social media, I can see a huge potential in flash fiction. I can’t see the point once we hit the extremes －micro-stories of one paragraph or even a handful of words － but I can see a role for 300-1000 words as a crystallisation of literary expression, similar in many ways to the haiku in poetry. I am on course to become a big fan of flash fiction, I suspect, both as a writer and as a reader.