I’ve spent the entire pandemic reading, writing, and teaching flash (fiction and creative nonfiction). And I have come to believe that if you want to be a better writer, an immersion in flash is one of the most powerful portals to get you there.
My fascination with flash started because short work was (and remains) the cornerstone of my Writing in the Dark virtual writing workshop, which I created in April 2020 specifically because, as the virus spread and all my in-person teaching and events evaporated, I grew scared and confused, along with everyone else I knew, and I couldn’t imagine how we were going to sustain our creative practices through that terrible time. Focusing on short work just felt right. After all, who could focus on reading or writing anything long back then? Not me, even though I’ve always been and still am a long-form writer! So, these past years have been awash in short work.
My three-year tour through flash has wholly transformed me as a writer, and it has changed my longer work too. Which only makes sense, because here’s the thing: all writing is made up of units—words, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, sections, chapters, etc. The stronger each unit, the stronger the whole. That seems so obvious, but I find that prose writers, especially long-form prose writers like me, easily lose track of this supreme truth. Maybe that’s because we get drunk on the sheer number of words and units available to us in our work. It really is intoxicating. But flash can help sober us up.
What flash can teach us (among other invaluable lessons) is the wild potential of the perfectly shaped scene. The deliciousness of such carefully crafted proportions. This is because although flash is short—often no longer than a miniature scene—it feels whole, just as the best shaped scenes should feel whole. What does this mean? Well, a leaf is perfectly whole in itself, while at the same time being only part of the tree. A well-shaped scene should feel like that—and flash teaches us how to do it. Flash can also teach us how to do what the best art does, which is to reveal something while also hiding it. This is because flash works through implication. It makes its meaning and aboutness felt, without needing to say it outright (and without, thankfully, explaining it). Finally, flash can teach us so much about time control and structure. This is because most often, flash focuses on a single moment in time—marching into that moment and either dwelling right there or progressing through it step by step until it reaches a place somewhere between the midpoint and the two-thirds mark of the work, where it pivots in a way that allows it to open up into more than the sum of its parts.
That pivot is crucial. It’s like a match strike that illuminates the story under the story. The pivot is an incandescent flash, one that happens so fast it sometimes blinds us with its brilliance.
An incredible example of what I’m talking about can be found in F.R. Martinez’s “That Place on Daniel Island,” winner of the 2020 Insider Prize sponsored by American Short Fiction. Written almost exclusively in dialogue all running together with no line breaks, the story unfolds both slowly and quickly as its two characters talk back and forth about where to go to eat. As the story progresses, we come to understand that one of the characters has been away. At the one-fourth mark of the story we get the first hint of “aboutness”:
‘Well, I’ll drive.’ ‘I sure would like to go to the other place though. I used to think of it when I was down for some reason.’ ‘Really. Were the burgers THAT good?’ ‘No. I mean they were good but—I don’t know I just liked the place because it was so laid back, so peaceful, so—Charleston. I mean, I know there was no beach there on Daniel Island, but when I remembered that place it felt like there shoulda been one nearby, like right down the road or something. It’s hard to explain, but when you’re locked up a place like that just seems like heaven, you know? To be away from everything. . . ’
But it is not until the sixty percent mark that the story pivots, becoming about something more than just a vague homecoming and which restaurants and stores still exist and where to eat:
‘You’ve been gone a long time, baby.’ ‘I feel like Rip Van Winkle. I used to hear people in prison talk about their lives outside. I’m talking about people with fifteen and twenty-year sentences. They had a long way to go, and they’d just started. I used to wanna say to them: listen, forget that life, man. It’s over. But I did it too, talked about my life, you know, with you and the kids here. But that was at first. After a couple of years, I stopped that. I didn’t talk to anybody. What for? People left. Or they got transferred to other prisons. Or they died. What was the use of trying to make friends, to get close to anybody.’
From here, the story becomes about so much more than the surface of the dialogue—it becomes something about marriage, love, and loss that has both everything and nothing to do with incarceration. Yes, the specifics of this situation involve incarceration. But in all marriages, you have three worlds: yours, theirs, and the one between, which becomes a third, shared one. It becomes, as poet Donald Hall put it, an essential “third thing” (in his famous essay by the same name, about his marriage with the poet Jane Kenyon, and his loneliness after her death, “The Third Thing”). The functioning and happiness of a marriage can depend in part on the ability of those within it to simultaneously and seamlessly share a third thing while maintaining their own unknowable worlds. Donald Hall wrote about this idea so much more beautifully than I ever will that I should probably just share the passage here:
Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly. For many couples, children are a third thing. Jane and I had no children of our own; we had our cats and dog to fuss and exclaim over—and later my five grandchildren from an earlier marriage. We had our summer afternoons at the pond, which for ten years made a third thing. After naps we loaded up books and blankets and walked across Route 4 and the old railroad to the steep slippery bank that led down to our private beach on Eagle Pond. Soft moss underfoot sent little red flowers up. Ghost birches leaned over water with wild strawberry plants growing under them. Over our heads white pines reared high, and oaks that warned us of summer’s end late in August by dropping green metallic acorns. Sometimes a mink scooted among ferns. After we acquired Gus he joined the pond ecstasy, chewing on stones. Jane dozed in the sun as I sat in the shade reading and occasionally taking a note in a blank book. From time to time we swam and dried in the heat. Then, one summer, leakage from the Danbury landfill turned the pond orange. It stank. The water was not hazardous but it was ruined. A few years later the pond came back but we seldom returned to our afternoons there. Sometimes you lose a third thing.
When this seamless movement or at least a sustainable balance between our interior worlds and that crucial “third thing” breaks down, a marriage can suffer, can become an unsharable place. Just look how F.R. Martinez uses a premise so specific, vivid, and real—incarceration and its felt impacts on a man re-entering the outside—to show us the intricacies and intimacies of human relationship on a much deeper and broader scale. And he does this all in the span of a single car ride, in barely 1000 words!
Let’s see what we can learn from what Martinez has so elegantly demonstrated for us.