State of Flash — Strength of Flash

The strength of that phrase: its muscles, its weight. It suggests: flash fiction is a forever contender, serious and suspect with its uneven temper. It says just checking on this fierce thing, just shaking the cage. This premise? Nothing faddish, no flash in the pan. After all, flash isn’t wishy-washy or wobbly or weak-kneed. It’s tradition. And like an opponent, it’s tougher up close than it looks from a distance. It takes patience, training. So I learn and learn again. And I teach—I teach essays, composition. Yet flash fiction barges into this conversation, insinuates. I tell my students There’s this thing…it might look ‘in-between’ at first but let me tell you something…. These students aren’t yet making stories, but I flash this genre at them, this thing that’s stunning and heavier than they suspect. Why? Our talk of pathos and persuasion in their essays, the punch in the gut they’re each aiming. We say: every piece of writing wants something from somebody. We ask: how can we arrange our words so that we’ll get it? Flash asks this question, and answers in thrilling and instructive ways. The relationship between desire and result is often knotted, rigged, meticulous in this genre. A brief piece must move, accumulate, and succeed at an astonishing rate. It has to_____ (do this unnamable thing). It has to crush the reader in the gut, and this is where the risks are big—when it doesn’t work, the failure is apparent. It thuds where other genres forfeit. It echoes when it falls (all that space around it). I’ve heard flash fiction called an “underdog”—poor non-genre, people say, poor non-committal fence-riding writers. But it’s both heavyweight and trainer. And while the training is not a means to “bigger, better” I sense that, if I can learn to do one small piece strong, I can muscle longer pieces, things that sprawl, grow novellish—and make them brutes. I’m not sure that the reverse holds true.