Flash Structures

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I'm working on a project that involves a whole whallop of short bits of writing.  Primarily fragments, 750-1200 words long.  Tiny things.  This size story is called "flash fiction" and, with the advent of an ADD culture and the internet, has risen in popularity (if not prestige) over the last decade.  So how do you write it?

A lot of authors bio's I've read, and authors I've met, have commented that writing short stories is, in some ways, more difficult than novels.  Per capita, every word holds more weight, carries more of the load.  I've seen novels wander around for pages on things that, while entertaining, aren't really important to the story.  Short stories don't generally have that freedom.  Perhaps a few paragraphs, but obviously, since the whole thing is smaller, the leeway is smaller.  Now if you consider flash is the smallest version of short story, we're approaching a word weight/significance ratio that is actually closer to poetry than typical prose.  Want to hear about how to stay up all night toiling for the perfect word combination?  Talk to a poet.  They're amazing that way.  Sadly, I am no such poet.  The beauty in the subtle combination of verbiage generally eludes me.  When it happens for me, it's not usually intentional.  I am more rooted in plot and setting, character and concept.  So short of becoming a poet and writing a poem long enough to be considered flash, what's a prose writer to do?

When faced with this sort of question I do what I always do; look to the authors I admire most and see how they handle it.  So I turn to my number one standby; Roger Zelazny.  When asked about his short stories Zelazny once explained that many of his short stories are what he'd consider the last chapters of novels he'd never written.  Going back and looking at them, it's clear that most of his short stories have a "tip of the iceberg" sort of feel when it comes to their world settings.  Characters enter the story already knowing one another, with pasts, and goals that they understand, even if the reader doesn't.  Follow with it, and once you get over that climax, it all makes sense.

So lets take a minute to look at how Zelazny would have to accomplish this.  In his mind, there is a novel.  Not set to paper perhaps, or maybe it is, but only in outline form.  What matters is that the novel, the whole thing, is there, present in the imagination.  Now, since it's fully developed, he can step in and begin writing wherever he likes.  (For the record, evidence that Zelazny wrote with "full concepts" from the start is all over his works; chapters out of sequence, backwards, massive chunks of missing time, only writing key scenes)  Instead of starting at the beginning, the call to action, where the character typically leaves their normal setting and tromps off into the story, he starts at the end.  At those final steps before the climax.  If you want to talk Heroes Journey speak, most of Zelazny's short stories start in either the "Supreme Ordeal" (the characters low point) or, more commonly, the moments before "Seizing the Sword/Item", that vital moment where everything come to a head and the character succeeds or fails. 

This doesn't mean that all those "unwritten" chapters have no place.  They are folded in to the ending, used to slow it down a bit, provide some context.  But instead of having the chapter where something is detailed out and explained, we have a paragraph, if that.  Sometimes it's literally only the scars and vague recollections of the previous material.  But it's there, and it adds a reality and richness to the story, something we can't see, but can feel.

So how does this apply to flash?  Well, if a short story is a twelve chapter novel with the first eleven "folded in" and the last remaining.  I'd say flash fiction should be a six scene short story with the first five scenes "folded in" and the last remaining. 

The climax of any story is the "tasty bit".  It's that sweet spot, like the center of a watermelon.  It's why we're on the trip, it's the destination.  Sure, the journey needs to be interesting, but in the end, you need, well... the end.  The climax.  

Flash doesn't have to be just a fragment of writing.  I doesn't have to be incomplete.  Flash is a climax, supported and nestled in the buffer of very real, carefully implied story.

Now go flash someone!