A Poet’s Insights on Writing Flash Fiction

While I’m a poet by trade, I dabble in fiction, and had the pleasure of engaging with flash fiction earlier this year. Read below for my thoughts on good concise writing and what I learned as a poet new to the art of storytelling. 

Close Study: “Sticks” by George Saunders

Retrieved here.

Sticks

Every year Thanksgiving night we flocked out behind Dad as he dragged the Santa suit to the road and draped it over a kind of crucifix he’d built out of metal pole in the yard. Super Bowl week the pole was dressed in a jersey and Rod’s helmet and Rod had to clear it with Dad if he wanted to take the helmet off. On the Fourth of July the pole was Uncle Sam, on Veteran’s Day a soldier, on Halloween a ghost. The pole was Dad’s only concession to glee. We were allowed a single Crayola from the box at a time. One Christmas Eve he shrieked at Kimmie for wasting an apple slice. He hovered over us as we poured ketchup saying: good enough good enough good enough. Birthday parties consisted of cupcakes, no ice cream. The first time I brought a date over she said: what’s with your dad and that pole? and I sat there blinking.

We left home, married, had children of our own, found the seeds of meanness blooming also within us. Dad began dressing the pole with more complexity and less discernible logic. He draped some kind of fur over it on Groundhog Day and lugged out a floodlight to ensure a shadow. When an earthquake struck Chile he lay the pole on its side and spray painted a rift in the earth. Mom died and he dressed the pole as Death and hung from the crossbar photos of Mom as a baby. We’d stop by and find odd talismans from his youth arranged around the base: army medals, theater tickets, old sweatshirts, tubes of Mom’s makeup. One autumn he painted the pole bright yellow. He covered it with cotton swabs that winter for warmth and provided offspring by hammering in six crossed sticks around the yard. He ran lengths of string between the pole and the sticks, and taped to the string letters of apology, admissions of error, pleas for understanding, all written in a frantic hand on index cards. He painted a sign saying LOVE and hung it from the pole and another that said FORGIVE? and then he died in the hall with the radio on and we sold the house to a young couple who yanked out the pole and the sticks and left them by the road on garbage day.

George Saunders is a master of concision and characterization. If you ever get an MFA in fiction, Saunders is sure to come up time and time again. Close studies of his work reveal so much insight into how we can tell the best stories in the fewest words, and this flash fiction piece is no exception.

Very effective in “Sticks” is Saunders’ use of symbolism. The metal crucifix is adorned with all kinds of symbols to represent the inner life of the narrator’s father. For much of his life, these symbols follow the American calendar year, in all its gleeful superficiality: ghosts on Halloween and furs on Groundhog’s Day. Only when Dad can no longer avoid the serious losses of life do his pole designs become less superficial. His children leave the house, and he invests a lot of energy into the Groundhog Day pole; then he mourns the victims of a Chilean earthquake. But it is the loss of his wife that marks a serious turning point in these pole designs, as he juxtaposes her life with Death itself, then imbues the pole with the ephemera of his life, his childhood, his mistakes, all the things he never said—spoken now with little audience and no response.

The narrator briefly describes his father’s meanness, and mentions that “the seeds of meanness” also bloomed within himself. But that meanness cannot be ignored when also considering the way this story is told. Here’s the final sentence:

The narrator never tells us whether or not he responded to the signs saying “LOVE” and “FORGIVE?”, but it’s likely he ignored those signs, even though he drove past and saw them, even though his father was dying, even though his father died alone in that empty house—which was sold and gutted of Dad’s small presence and preserved only in this short sad story.

Well, what about that? The narrator’s father didn’t seem kind to him or any of his siblings. Should the narrator have forgiven him? Is it okay that the narrator didn’t seem to love him? These are open-ended questions, of course, and we’ll each respond to them based on our own lived experiences and beliefs about family. But that seed of meanness is there, looking at those signs and then looking away.

Equally important to this story, and to flash fiction in general, is the story’s style and word choice. There’s a starkness in the language that makes this story startling to read. The narrator’s description of the pole as a crucifix immediately raises one’s hackles: this practice of adorning the pole feels like a religious practice, but devoid of spirituality. And the fact that this pole was the father’s “only concession to glee” is also unsettling. A concession—as though glee is an indulgence to be avoided. The narrator’s own descriptions of life events feel rather impersonal, such as, merely, “Mom died” or “all written in a frantic hand on index cards.” Even the title, “Sticks,” almost mocks the father for the insignificance of his one creative indulgence—and the narrator himself was one of those “sticks” standing near the pole.

In other words, there’s a kind of hollow empathy happening in this story: we, the reader, might feel bad for the narrator AND the father, but the narrator himself only recognizes his father’s descent into despair with little reaction. Again, there’s that blooming meanness. Without even hinting at the phrase “intergenerational trauma,” we see the workings of that trauma permeating every word of this story.

Lastly, notice how every sentence of this story is like its own mini-narrative. Powerful, formative events are crunched and juxtaposed against each other, forming a life story in 392 words. We could ask for more details about those events, but we don’t need them to get a complete story, filled with symbolism and rife with thematic interpretation.

For more on writing flash fiction, check out our article:

https://writers.com/how-to-write-flash-fiction

When a Poet Writes Flash Fiction…

Poetry is my first and primary love. I read a lot of fiction, and I like to write fiction, but I’m more of a “fiction writer by proxy” than anything else. Most of my insights into fiction writing come from the fiction courses I took in college, my research into the craft, or else my lifelong love of storytelling.

So, when a literary journal asked me to send them a flash fiction piece, in advance of judging a flash fiction contest for them, I froze. Sure, I’d dabbled in the form before, but I didn’t have anything written that I was confident in. The pressure to showcase myself as a valid judge for the contest was on. “Let me fiddle with something and I’ll get back to you before the end of the week,” I said.

Flash fiction is short, but no less difficult to write well, so coming up with a solid flash piece in a matter of days was daunting. Luckily, my own background as a poet came in handy—I’ve found that, the shorter the word count, the more helpful the tools of poetry become.

Here’s what I learned from writing my first published flash fiction piece (after masquerading as an expert on the topic…):

1. Imagery, symbolism, word choice… these are your friends.

I detest the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words.” You can paint a picture in ten words or fewer. Imagery and symbolism are paramount to telling a full story with a tight word count: you need to give readers something vivid, and you need your images to mean something at both a literal and figurative level.

Saunders makes this look easy. You can see the progression of the narrator’s father’s despair simply by the progression of images. Additionally, I’m drawn to the sense of artifice in the first paragraph’s images, many of them relaying an idyllic American lifestyle—Thanksgiving turkeys and Halloween ghosts, masking a family burdened by unhappiness.

We learn a lot about the narrator and his father through these images, both as these images exist and how they’re described. We see the father’s desperate pleas for reconciliation, we feel the narrator’s shrug.

This leads me to my second insight, which is:

2. Don’t tell us who the characters are—let the characters tell us who they are.

The adage, of course, is “show, don’t tell.” But it’s important to isolate this principle when it comes to characterization. Concise, effective fiction writing requires us to see each character’s personality and traits on full display whenever they talk or act.

The narrator’s father doesn’t allow his children ice cream on their birthday. Just cupcakes. (As someone who has always hated cupcakes, this would have been tantamount to torture in my childhood.)

More saliently, the father never learned how to express his emotions or ask for help. Trapped inside these constraints, his pole is the only way he can speak to the world. He never tells us that he mourns the loss of his wife, but the way he decorates his pole tells us everything.

Of course, some telling is necessary. It helps when the narrator tells us directly that his father was mean, and that the narrator found his father’s meanness blooming inside of him. But, even when Saunders “tells” instead of “shows,” the telling is thematic—we see intergenerational trauma playing out across the paragraph break; we see an ending doomed to disregard.

Which leads me to my last insight:

3. End at the moment of revelation.

The story should end at the place where insight has been revealed to the reader. Now, insight takes many forms. It can be a revelation to the reader; it can be a moment of truth about ourselves, our society, our world; it can be a moment where the protagonist stares down the barrel of their own personhood, seeing themselves naked and vulnerable. Revelations can show us trauma or resilience, hope or despair, life or death. But something must be revealed.

Saunders’ ending comes as no surprise, yet it’s still a punch in the gut. What’s revealed is the futility of the father’s attempts at love and forgiveness when he spent his whole life stingy with love, with forgiveness. How quickly the world seemed to forget about him, his one attempt at self-expression erased when he was no longer living.

Bleak? Absolutely. And we can certainly debate about whether or not the father deserves such an unhappy ending. Questions of love and forgiveness are often very complicated. But, regardless of morals and what’s deserved or what isn’t, the ending of this story is realistic, and it reveals something true, if terrible, about how people relate to one another.

I don’t know that I did any of these tips justice, but I am pretty proud of the story I came up with. You can read it here, if you’d like.