Saturday
Saturday Interview: What I Love About Flash Fiction
Imagine that you asked me, “What draws you to the flash fiction form?” Imagine this is the answer.
Well, first of all, the people who write flash are very cool. Secondly, I like the role word count plays in defining flash, how each word functions like the tick of a clock or a bomb. I love the ways of making words count, either all of them with equal weight or with just one word carrying it all. I love how the title might become a first line or last line or the entire back story. As one of the lonely kids who spent almost every single waking moment reading, I fell in love with words more than people, I think, and prefer trying to get words to line up the way I imagine to trying to get characters to want things and put these actions in motion long enough to get a story out of it. I love flash’s awareness of its own end, right from the first word. And I love that, unlike a novel whose words seem to be written so they can be forgotten and exist then as ghosts that haunt what comes afterward, flash fiction lacks that past and future for the reader. It only is. And finally, as someone who wanted to be a poet but loved the sentence, I do love its poetic qualities, and how it allows me to be a kind of poet who wields sentences instead of line breaks, and to wear a baseball cap instead of a beret.
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posted on 11 Apr 2010, 8:26 PM
That last sentence absolutely sums it up for me - perfectly said!
posted on 14 Apr 2010, 7:20 AM
Thanks, Cate!
posted on 14 Apr 2010, 12:37 AM
So then these stories are just like haiku in a way no?
posted on 14 Apr 2010, 7:18 AM
That's an interesting way of looking at them. So many flash fiction writers are taking on this compressed form in different ways that it's hard to generalize. Joseph Young, a flash writer from Baltimore, has a collection, EASTER RABBIT, that is very much like flash-haiku.
posted on 4 Aug 2010, 3:17 PM
I love this! You stated it perfectly! Oh, and I was also a lonely kid who spent all her time reading! Thanks for sharing this!