Regarding the Cruel Moment in the College Flash Workshop

Workshopping standard-length fiction can be a demanding enterprise for all parties involved; strangely, flash fiction often asks for more. While there are always exceptions among initiated students, it is understandable if the current generation of college-level undergraduates may find dubious their prospects of accomplishing viable flash drafts for an entire semester, instead of a brief module for an introductory multi-genre course. I gave myself the opportunity to face this trepidation with an upper-division workshop I taught at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette for the Fall 2012 term: fifteen straight weeks of reading and writing flash, nothing else. Based on previous workshops, I knew the difficulties for novice fiction writers trying short-short stories for the first time, acquiescing to less-thanfully developed characters and plots. Now I was going all in, tempting either disaster or glory.

Instructors should not underestimate the reticence of college students to work with flash, regardless of how eager or experienced they may be, but not because they are grappling with new forms. This particular class of mine, to note, featured no creative writing majors and only one student who read and worked with flash before. I thought it necessary, then, to build familiarity at the outset of the course between past and present; and, toward this end, I paired models of narrative condensing technique by the early American practitioners such as Ambrose Bierce and Ernest Hemingway with contemporary pieces including Steve Almond’s “Rumors of Myself,” Amy Hempel’s “What Were the White Things?” and Sherrie Flick’s “The Paperboy” from the Flash Fiction Forward anthology. Flick’s story in particular proved accessible in illustrating how an abridged storyline can continue to explore its protagonist beyond what would be the final destination of a standard narrative arc (an older woman’s tryst with a paperboy) to find a more emotionally revealing and engaging moment (a bittersweet awareness she will become a young man’s first love in his much later retrospect) which is ever present in those first canonical flash fictions. In some ways, this phase of connecting older and newer texts may be most essential for effective work-shopping, before they start putting down first words—although something as simple as impromptu speed writing with an egg timer can start breaking down just as well the entrenched view of good fiction requiring a severe, prolonged pondering, both on and off the page. My students, I was pleased to find, managed to get the bigger message they needed to survive a semester-long flash course: fear not incompleteness. Let moment speak plainly if it will not sing.

Finding and building upon moment are seldom easy matters for undergraduate writers when they make an unsettling discovery about the nature of flash. Because of the form’s intimate bond with language, some students may feel they have to be capable poets in addition to being fiction writers, and this is where flash drafts can get out of hand, especially if an instructor wants to avoid delving into larger considerations of the aesthetic divide (if any) between flash fiction and prose poetry. For the most part, the class put the occasional poetry to satisfying and sometimes very encouraging use; however, in making this correlation of prosody to narrative structure, my students soon observed—and not without a hint of discomfort—an inherent callousness of story that the form stylistically imparts moment upon traditional-oriented flashes. Perhaps this cruelty clashes with a general idea of fiction writing as holistic or cathartic exercises which, at least, may treat some of its characters well so that it will treat its readers well. I confess I likely further contributed to this conflicting view by engaging my students in triptych forms at the end of the semester as a last challenge, using the artwork of Francis Bacon and a couple of Brian Evenson pieces (“Calling the Hour,” “Garker’s Aestheticals”) to let them tinker with deliberate disfigurement of subject. All flashes are certainly not predetermined maneuvers in brutality, but I think an instructor should be prepared to address the matter at some point when students start finding this—and they usually will. While the sum of final workshop pieces ran the emotional gamut from sentimental to zany hilarious, each student did build different concepts of how they and, in turn, their characters address the crucial moment which must be found in flash, whether in sad recognition or sadistic fashion, and these latter examples were not far removed thematically from classic short-short stories like Bierce’s “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” which, it can be argued, use narrative brevity to play a harsh trick on their protagonists.

Yet acknowledging and appropriating malice in moment along different treatments paid real dividends for the class, helping to produce a strong crop of final portfolios as well as a student’s first published work in a small on-line journal. Another particular student, whose body language from the start suggested I had much work to do to win her over, submitted what I thought was one of the strongest drafts for the entire course: a coming-of-age piece built around an instructional mode I assigned, which was a rougher version of Jamaica Kincaid’s much-anthologized “Girl” despite that we had not read Kincaid and, supposedly, this student never seeing it before. Better still, the student’s draft incorporated aspects of adolescent life in southern Louisiana high schools, with a flair for idiomatic profanity which her characters usually excelled at, giving it a distinct flavor akin to this region which paralleled Kincaid’s treatment of mother-daughter relationships from the Caribbean perspective. I was impressed this student could arrive at a conception of flash having to cleverly mistreat—and not outright kill—its darlings to find a story that takes reasonable chances beyond the author’s personal value system to affirm a different truth. “There’s not always a moral or a message that lines up with what I believe,” she would write for me in her portfolio introduction. “However, it is always what I see.”