(Sometimes the things making noise in my head are just thoughts and they want to be out there as much as the creative things. I gift you this. See what you think.)
THE EMPEROR'S NEW CLOTHES, OR FLASHING
I have had some success myself with writing flash fiction. I was one of five shortlisted in Smokelong’s Kathy Fish Fellowship Award 2008; I have been highly commended by Biscuit, honoured by Binnacle and short and long listed by Flash 500. My work has appeared in prestigious magazines, both print and on-line, and in a text book guide to flash fiction as an example of what can be achieved. And I enjoy writing flash fiction.
I have written a whole novel that works as a series of flashed pieces, though these are interconnected pieces and not wholly self-contained so might not pass muster as true flash. I have written a homage to my late father in fifty flashed pieces, like anecdotes that might be told by family and friends at a funeral gathering, but again they sort of hang together. The point is I am no stranger to flash fiction and I can see possibilities with the form.
And yet, I can’t help feeling that there is something wrong with what’s happening with flash fiction. I can’t help feeling that there’s something of the Emperor’s New Clothes about it’s current popularity.
I am a teacher of English in a High School. In the upper school students can study English at different levels. They have to submit a folio of essays to be marked. If a student studying at the lowest level produces an essay of the same length as a student studying at the highest level (say 1200 words) then the student at the lowest level is penalised. This is the case because there are set upper limits for essay length at each level and they differ. You might wonder why there is an upper limit at all, and maybe the answer would have more to do with expediency than writing - after all, someone has to be paid to mark the work and time is money! But that a poorer ability student has the task of expressing him/herself in fewer words than a student of higher ability does seem to be a little back to front.
Maybe there isn‘t a connection here, but it seems to me that the rise of flash fiction has more to do with expediency than it does with writing.
Competitions should be about developing good writing - in a perfect world perhaps. Or about encouraging writing , or identifying talent, or giving recognition for writing achievement. But competitions, when all is said and done, are mostly about raising money or raising the profile of the organisation staging the competition (which may have a link to money-making too). Writers are more often than not charged for their entry and the entry fees pay for the competition. You can charge as much for a flash fiction entry as you can for a full length story, but judging the flashed pieces becomes less time-consuming a task than judging stories where the limit is in the thousands of words. (This may also explain why there are so few competitions where the word limit is higher than 3000 words.) And imagine, there are some flash fiction competitions that set the limit at a hundred words, and some even tighter than that.
We live in the internet age and the argument runs that flash fiction sits well with that ‘web surfing’ level of focus. And maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s the reason for the rise and rise. Maybe that’s why Hemingway’s six worder is lauded as the pinnacle of economy and pathos, where I see only six words.
I read ‘Einstein’s Dreams’ again recently, by Alan Lightman. I read it again because I remembered enjoying something about it and at the same time being somehow dissatisfied with it. It is clever. The writing is good, even brilliant. But the flashed time pieces that make up the novel, seem ultimately unsatisfying, or at least satisfying only at a certain level. It’s like leafing through a book of sketches by a brilliant artist. I love seeing sketches, and can see they have worth in their own right. Personally my sketches (when I am being a visual artist) are often much better than the finished works. But hang a brilliant sketch next to a brilliant finished work and there’s no contest in me for which I prefer. I love the pieces in Lightman’s book and he does at least try to hang them together in some way; he seeks to unite them with his prologue-interludes-epilogue pieces, and I think whilst this can help place the flashed time pieces into their context it does not ultimately make for a good complete book for the reader. The individual pieces are brilliant, the concept is brilliant, but somehow for this reader that is not quite enough.
I read a new writer’s collection, just published last year, all of the pieces are ‘flash’. I had heard good things about the book and I was intrigued. And sure enough there is some cleverness in something of what I read. And the prose is easy and not damnably bad. And I could see what was going on. But ultimately, reading the book was like feasting on hors d’oeuvres and really quite unsatisfying. I wanted more. The pieces read like sketched thoughts and I wanted the fully flavoured finished story. Bite-size is not how everything should be; we need something more to chew on. And flash has, I think, yet to find its proper place at the table.
I enjoy writing flash because I enjoy playing with words and stories. Often my flashed pieces are like quick sketches, and many flashes, like seeds planted, have grown into something more. And one or two of these may become more leafy still. (sorry for all of these mixed metaphors!) I will continue to write flash and to use flash as a key to unlock my inner voices and as a way of quickly getting down on paper what might otherwise be so fleeting as to have flown before I could pin it down. I will also occasionally marvel at short pieces and think ‘that’s it!’ when I find what a true flash can do. But I will also try not to be fooled into seeing new clothes where there is nothing.
What about you?
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