“It Was a Simple Summer Day” or Was It? Flash Fiction and the Study of Craft in the Classroom

We don’t begin our stories with tiresome information, so why do we so routinely begin our introduction to creative writing classes that way? Reciting a syllabus that students can simply read on their own is patronizing, and questions about why students have enrolled in a creative writing class, why they want to write, or what their favorite books are rarely seem to elicit fruitful class discussions. Much like the opening in a good short story, I instead try to provide a solid “hook” on the first day of class. My goal is to instill excitement in my students about the writing journey that we are about to embark on together, and the pedagogical tool that I’ve found to be most effective in this regard is the use of flash fiction.

On the first day of an introductory fiction writing class, I show a piece of flash fiction on the overhead projector and ask my students to read it silently to themselves while I take attendance. Afterwards, I give a brief lecture on some foundational aspect of craft, usually either on point of view, plot, or characterization. I then place my students into groups of three or four and ask them to discuss how the element of craft I’ve just talked about functions in the story projected overhead. Students have an opportunity to apply what they’ve heard to a piece of fiction, which not only accelerates their understanding of craft, but also helps ease the anxiety and intimidation that many of them feel in their first creative writing class.

To give one example of how this works in practice, in my latest introduction to creative writing class, I gave a brief lecture on narrative arc, noting how stories typically began with conflict and complications that eventually lead to a crisis action, sometimes culminating in a falling action.

Afterwards, my students applied this lesson to Hannah Bottomy’s “Currents,” a piece of flash fiction centered on a young boy who drowned in the ocean.1 The story is told in reverse order; thus, the first sentence refers to the final event in the story, the second sentence to the action before that, and so on, until the last sentence references the first moments in the narrative: “BEFORE THAT, it was a simple summer day”. Most of my students admitted that they were disoriented with the piece after reading it through the first time, but this was probably because very few of them were familiar with the short story genre in general. After working through the story a second and third time, and especially after reading the story backwards so that they could piece together the events chronologically, they no longer found the inverse structure to be gimmicky or confusing. One group of students thought that because each section after the opening began with the phrase “BEFORE THAT,” the repetitious prose reflected the waves of the ocean in the story, while the capitalization’s ruptured font indicated the threat of violence. Another group was able to feel a kinship with the protagonist because the plot structure forced them to share in his attempt to make sense of what had just happened. One of my most astute students noticed that such mirroring between the reader and the characters was heightened with how the protagonist in the opening section “did not protest against the night”, a situation that was in stark contrast to the simple summer day at the end of the story. Viewed this way, my student suggested that the “currents” could be read in two opposing ways: the ocean’s currents resulted in the drowning of the young boy, but read metaphorically, they simultaneously pulled the reader from darkness to lightness, i.e. from confusion to understanding.

By the end of class, most of my students seemed to be genuinely excited about what they had learned, and they didn’t even seem to mind the homework I assigned. I asked them to read another piece of flash fiction and then to write a short essay, no longer than one page, analyzing the plot structure. This gave my students an opportunity to reflect on what they had learned in class, and it also required them to deepen their understanding because they had to produce a craft analysis on their own. It was also good practice for the workshops that would take place later. I repeated a similar process throughout the semester, essentially supplementing my lectures with different pieces of flash fiction for my students to analyze, both in the classroom and for homework.

In the feedback I received from my students, I learned that whereas the longer texts in some of their other literature courses seemed overwhelming, flash fiction allowed them to feel more confident in their analysis. Simply put, flash fiction was easier for them to comprehend. To be clear, as a writer of flash fiction, I don’t believe the genre is a lesser or more simplistic form; however, due to its brevity, it does seem to be more straightforward for the novice reader and writer to see elements of craft at work. Give beginning students a Flannery O’Connor or Alice Munro story, not to mention a novel by Faulker or Morrison, and they can soon become lost or overwhelmed. But give them a story like Bottomy’s “Currents,” and with just a few interpretive tools they can become quite insightful readers.

This story originally appeared in Quarterly West (Issue 57, 2004) and was subsequently republished in James Thomas’s and Robert Shapard’s anthology, Flash Fiction Forward (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006): pp. 51-52