Flash of... Brilliance?

Flash fiction has never really been my “thing”. The type of fiction I tend to gravitate to is more extended, chapter-like fiction—gritty, lengthy stories, full of sub-context and side plots. So, flash fiction presents a challenge for me, one that I have started to tackle more frequently. I’ll be critiquing one of my most recent pieces Survival Rate. The goal was to end in a twist and subvert the reader’s expectations in some groundbreaking way. The side quest goal was to make it only five hundred words.

To say that I’m unhappy with it is an understatement. Flash fiction, to me, must be written hastily, or else it risks going on too long and thereby ceases to be flash fiction. It is imperfect in my mind due to the hastily written nature of it. However, with the unusual rules I broke with it, there is a universe to explore when it comes to structure. (Pun absolutely intended.)

A goal I gave myself was to use a different format for telling this story that I’ve never used before. The practical non-existence of grammar is highly experimental for me. The sentence structure follows an unusual pattern. The first and last “paragraphs” are made up of single-word sentences. And so on with two- three- four-, and five-word sentences in the second/fourth third/fifth, and sixth “paragraphs”.

I use the term paragraph lightly as this piece of fiction is more poetic than fiction. Paragraphs don’t matter so much in this story, visually speaking. You know those poems where the lines and words are broken up on the page to create an image? I have that sort of thing going on in this piece. The countdown section looks like the profile of a rocket ship blasting off. Another interesting visual is right after that with the word weightless. I spaced the letters far apart to make them appear like they were drifting away due to being, of course, weightless. This is a rule I don’t think I’ve broken in my other fiction pieces. As a visual artist as well as a writer, it is fun and interesting to play with the appearance of words on the page.

As far as the plot is concerned, I wanted to leave certain things up to the imagination of the reader. With the brevity of the piece, I couldn’t say much anyway, so I used that to my advantage. The plot starts off being fairly straight forward. It is about the middle of the story, the section with the five-word sentences, that the plot runs a bit vague. This acts as a turning point, visually and literally, in the story as the sentences start to get shorter again. Don’t worry, I won't give anything away.

The flash fiction structure, I must admit, is starting to grow on me. It is challenging, and fun, and seems to allow for more creative wiggle-room than longer-form fiction. I will keep honing my skills at brevity and keep writing flash fiction pieces, so long as folks keep reading them.