A Rebuttal for Naftali, 17 Years Later

Because flash fiction's been around a lot longer than just this generation!

The first time I learned about flash fiction – short pieces under 1000 words, or even 750 words, depending on who you ask – I was an undergraduate at Stern College in the aughts. I told my brother about it (not the pro-Palestinian one, the other one, who is also pro-Palestinian but isn’t famous for it, he’s famous for 4-hour dance events in Berlin that he swears up and down involve nothing more than cacao beans sometimes), and he huffed that flash is another symptom of an ADD generation. I walked into class and repeated that, expecting my professor to come up with some philosophical defense for bite-sized storytelling. But he just shrugged and acknowledged it as fact. Another wide-eyed belief popped.

Of course, I’ve more than dabbled in flash fiction since getting my MFA. I didn’t start out that way, though. In the typical MFA workshop format, styled after the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, you get two rounds to submit a story and listen to your peers and instructor discuss it. The maximum you can submit is 25 double-spaced pages. You can submit less, but wouldn’t that be wasting the opportunity? And you can submit parts of a longer work, but wouldn’t your readers be getting a truncated impression of what they might otherwise if they read the whole thing?

This is how the whole interlinked short story collection became a thing, how Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for A Visit from the Goon Squad. (The publisher hilariously emblazoned the cover with “a novel”, as though they could make it so by just insisting.) (Okay, fine, she actually won for the chapter styled to look like a PowerPoint presentation.) You submit a story at a time to your workshop, and then by the end of your MFA you’ve got a whole themed collection.

Thus, the double-spaced, 25-page story became my default length.

Then I got jealous of all the poets getting their work out there so often, and the decision to write shorter pieces became economic: If I’m not publishing a novel any time soon, the least I can do is get a bunch of shorter publications under my belt. It took a minute, but I figured out that a sub-1000 word piece could be written/read/accepted quicker than a short story of 5000 words. So I’d take one of those workshop submissions and cut it down, killing darlings left and right, to get it under 1000.

Ten years on (!!!!!!!!!), these short pieces have become almost mercenary for me – finding a concept, getting the perspective right, and then finding the best two or three scenes to represent the emotion I’m trying to evoke.

And, yes, some of it feels a bit like cheating: I don’t have to tell the reader what kind of people live in this house, if I reveal just the right mix of art and furniture instead. I don’t have to delve into the depths of the human psyche if I can just skim the surface and hint at what’s below.

More and more I’ve realized that when I go in the opposite direction, extending flash fiction into a short story or even a novel, the hints and indications don’t survive. The more I describe about a character, the more detailed they become and the less I can leave unsaid. I’m not Hemingway, I’m not writing poetic post-apocalyptic fiction, I am extremely verbose and extremely specific about things I know and any attempt to be mysterious only works for me in short bursts.

Anyhow, back to my brother, whose opinion was very important to me when I was seventeen and probably still is, except we don’t live in Manhattan at the same time anymore, experiencing culture together and having these kinds of conversations. (I still kick myself that when he called me with tickets to a matinee of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, I didn’t go because I didn’t want to cut school.)

IF FLASH FICTION IS SO ADHD, HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN THIS???

OR THIS????????

Today, I posit to you that the comic strip genre was the original flash fiction. Good comics are short, character-driven stories that involve plot twists or highlight the mundanity of its characters’ lives. (In the bad ones, things just happen to the characters.) Sure, comics can build on a long-standing relationship the reader might have with the characters, but they’re intended to just as easily speak to a newbie.

Concepts are distilled into their purest form – most often setting and dialogue – to convey them as straightforwardly as possible.

And comics usually end with punchline – the equivalent of ending with “a button or a bow” in flash fiction, where there’s a twist or an aha moment in the final stretch (though editors are pretty sick of that by now).

As someone who struggles in the trenches of writing to keep the larger concepts in mind while working on scenes, I love that flash lets me get out of my head for a little, write a little without getting sucked so far into the action that I forget what I’m actually trying to do.

So, as with so many of the things for which Millennials are blamed, there is precedent for our ways. However ADD that makes us!