In his workshop, Nailing the Sound of Flash at the Flash Fiction Festival, July 2022, Christopher Allen presented different ways of thinking of flash fiction — as a chef, sculptor, songwriter, profession platform diver.
Think like a songwriter — we have three minutes to create emotion in the reader. Flash fiction can achieve a musical quality that is hard for novelists to sustain over many pages. You can use repetition to create both rhythm and tension.
Write your text as a dance and infuse it in to your story.
Like a diver, we must enter the water at the perfect angle, to create a minimal splash, dive deep and return while we still have breath. Just as the diver is shaped by constraints, word limits form a container that give flash fiction its shape.
Like a sculptor, look for the art in the stone, shave it back. Many writers write a large block of text and use the editor’s chisel to shape it. He suggested a method used by George Saunders: Write a long stream of words without stopping to edit, circle what you want to keep, and use the circled words to form a new story.
Write like a chef who plans meals ahead and waits for the response of the guest. Follow a recipe for delicious flash: it should be compact, with a sense of brevity, urgency to drive the story along, and stakes to give your protagonist a reason to act.
Christopher asked us to consider the sound of flash fiction and discuss it groups. Is flash fiction brassy and clanging, melodic and sonorous, or does it whisper to us like a leaves in an evening breeze? He got us to list ideas starting with What if… and to write a letter to one of our characters, encouraging them that better days will come. The exercise gave me a new insight into a character’s feelings and his perspective on his current struggle.
Find Christopher Allen’s flash fiction collection, And Other Household Toxins, here. This collection, according to Michelle Elvy, “becomes a gentle means of revealing knotted realities.” Published by Matter Press.
And check out Smokelong Quarterly, dedicated to pint-sized, well-crafted fiction, and a place you can also find talks, workshops and events.
