FlashFiction.Net

My problem (well one of many) is an inability to tolerate uncertainty—and of course the world’s full of uncertainty, so life is, to put it mildly, a bit of an adventure. Uncertainty creates anxiety and anxiety creates the desire to relieve it, and the way to do that is to make the thing creating the anxiety end as soon as possible. And that desire (for things to end quickly) might not be a great characteristic for a lover, but, as one might guess, it’s a pretty darn good one for the writer of flash fiction.

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Writing is chock-full of not-knowing, not only about where things might be going but also about whether one has gotten it right/write. From the moment I begin to write, the anxiety arises, an anxiety that originates in my need to know, for certain, all those things that one cannot know in this world, those things (forever) denied me. One way to make that anxiety end would be to accept the world as it is, to accept that uncertainty, but that seems something I’m quite incapable of, and I’m equally incapable of the option: stop writing. So that leaves me with the anxiety caused by my inability to tolerate the uncertainty associated with writing, and the urgent desire, once a piece begins, for it to end.

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This desire for the ending creates the desire for compression, for words and backstories and names and connectors to disappear, for stories to begin right away, for the action to be essential and singular, for each word to be (possibly) the one that ends it all. Flash fiction writers (the ones I’m drawn to) don’t seem to write flash because it’s something to try, because it’s short, because it might be fun, but because they have no choice. Without flash, there might be nothing to contain their desires. Each time they write, they face the intolerable, and there is, in each word that rushes toward that ending, that sense that nothing is wasted. The flash writer demands an ending as soon as the first word is typed. It’s odd that the flash writer often writes beyond that word, but maybe that’s a safeguard against the uncertainty, to include two, three, four possible endings, just to be sure.

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Afterwards, there is the intolerable uncertainty of the world to face. But there’s this thing written down as evidence that, for the briefest of moments, the intolerable was tolerated and the resultant anxiety drove something into existence rather than into hiding.

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