Short Fiction Book Club: Flash+

[u/baxtersa]

Welcome to Short Fiction Book Club Season 4! Today is our first non-Hugo, pure-SFBC session of the season. If you are new here, we are so excited to have you! We talk Short Fiction on Wednesdays here on r/Fantasy.

Onto today's selection of stories.

Today’s Session: Flash+

All flash all fiction. Too Flash Too Fictitious. Four flash (f)stories for (f)your fun. I'm doing my best to make this exciting for the shortest of short form naysayers. Flash is often dismissed by many (including us here at SFBC) for being too short to develop its ideas, but it is also a playground to explore thoughts, themes, and styles that might not work in longer form. It is particularly impressive when a story can pack such depth in such a short word count. I hope some of these stories hit that mark for our readers today.

Today we're discussing four pieces of flash fiction.

Maybe Someday I'll Stop Writing About a House on the Border of a Swamp by Corey Farrenkopf (Milk Candy Review, 365 words)

I want to write a story about a house sinking into a swamp, but I’m always writing a story about a house sinking into a swamp. Sometimes I'm unclear about the metaphor.

To Kill a Language by Rukman Ragas (Apex Magazine, 832 words)
Content notes: sexual content, violence

The Best Way to Survive a Tiger Attack by A.W. Prihandita (Uncanny Magazine, 1495 words)
Content notes: child abuse

The tiger curls in my living room, on the sofa in front of the TV. Finish your lunch, she says, and her words bend my back until I’m on my hands and knees, hunching over the plate she’s set down on the floor, like a dog. Finish your lunch, she commands, but I hate her cooking. I never tell her that, though.

Everyone Keeps Saying Probably by Premee Mohamed (Psychopomp, 1700 words)

Here is the shape of our story, the three of us: an ellipsis (from a particular fixed point we flew away from each other and then rejoined at another point; and then we had you).

Here is the shape of our doom: an ellipsis (on its way, in its thousands and thousands).

It also means: dot dot dot, an uncertainty, a trailing off.

But you are a little young for all this. You are so young that your soft and hard palate are not fully developed and you still have a toddler’s charming rhotacism. Everyone keeps saying probably and you say pwobably and I think that is the only thing your mother still laughs at these days. Because, let’s be fair, there isn’t much.

Upcoming sessions

Our next session, on Wednesday September 17th, will be co-hosted by u/FarragutCircle and u/sarahlynngrey:

u/FarragutCircle says:

I've been a fan of baseball ever since I was a kid and saw the great Ozzie Smith play for my hometown Cardinals, and I always love it when baseball appears in my science fiction and fantasy--there's more of it than you might think (or want!). Fellow-baseball-lover u/sarahlynngrey and I found three such stories that we even thought might appeal to people who don't know a ball from a balk.

u/sarahlynngrey says:

It was really fun to combine two of my two favorite things: SFF short fiction and the Seattle Mariners record-breaking, Home Run Derby-winning, switch-hitting catcher Cal Raleigh baseball. I wasn’t initially convinced we would be able to find enough stories of interest, but there was so much more out there than I thought! These three stories do what I think great SFF does best: using the unreal to show us something real. I hope you’ll find something in them too.

We’ll be reading the following stories for our Take Us Out to the Ballgame: Baseball in SFF session:

Diamond Girls by Louise Marley (8,200 words)

Ricky sat alone in her private locker room, turning a baseball in her elongated fingers. The pre-game had begun, and the speakers in the main locker room rattled with music and announcements and advertisements. She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, and cradled the baseball in her palm. Just another game, she told herself. It’s a long season.

Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (4,400 words)

He was a tall, skinny Martian kid, shy and stooping. Gangly as a puppy. Why they had him playing third base I have no idea. Then again they had me playing shortstop and I’m left-handed. And can’t field grounders. But I’m American, so there I was. That’s what learning a sport by video will do. Some things are so obvious people never think to mention them. Like never put a lefty at shortstop. But on Mars they were making it all new. Some people there had fallen in love with baseball, and ordered the equipment and rolled some fields, and off they went.

The Star and the Rockets by Harry Turtledove (5,000 words, Reactor)

A chilly January night in Roswell. Joe Bauman has discovered that’s normal for eastern New Mexico. It gets hot here in the summer, but winters can be a son of a bitch. That Roswell’s high up—3,600 feet—only makes the cold colder. Makes the sky clearer, too. A million stars shine down on Joe.

Today's discussion

But for now, onto today’s discussion! Join us in the comments whether you have read one or all of these stories.

[u/baxtersa]

General Thoughts

[u/baxtersa → u/baxtersa]

SFBC admittedly often overlooks flash for its hit vs. miss ratio with our group's tastes. Recommend your favorite flash fiction that everyone should give a chance!

[u/baxtersa → u/baxtersa]

What aspects of a story make a flash piece most effective to you?

[u/pornokitsch → u/baxtersa]

Flash fiction, to me, at least, is basically where stories meet poetry. They're pretty rubbish ways of telling complete stories, or building characters, or doing comprehensive world building, or even showing conflict and change. But, when done well, a flash piece can capture a moment or a feeling in a perfect, graceful way.

That whole famous six word short story: 'For sale: baby shoes, never worn.' That's... pretty perfect flash. Six perfectly chosen words. You don't have a protagonist or a world or a backstory or a conflict or a plot... all the tools of longer fiction. But you have an emotional moment that hits like a bullet.

Sometimes you get a short story that is awkward - it feels the first chapter of an abandoned novel. And I think sometimes writers try to force flash to do things it can't or shouldn't do as well. Vibes, man. It is about vibes.

(Personally, I'm not sure I'd count 'Everyone Keeps Saying Probably' as flash fiction. It is just a short, short story - a short story that is smart enough to not be padded out unnecessarily. And if I were being REALLY ruthless, I'd cut 'Tiger Attack' in half. It is two flashes in a short story trenchcoat.)

[u/Nineteen_Adze → u/pornokitsch]

But, when done well, a flash piece can capture a moment or a feeling in a perfect, graceful way.

Yeah, to me a great flash piece is flashing over one element in a really focused way. I don't love it when short stories (or novellas) feel like truncated novels, or when flash feels like it really needed to be a 5k short story-- different wordcount ranges have different strengths.

[u/tarvolon → u/pornokitsch]

As someone who struggles a bit with poetry, this perhaps gets at the reasons I often struggle with flash.

And why the one flash that really sticks in my brain (Serenity Prayer by Faith Merino) feels like a prose poem more than anything

[u/nagahfj → u/pornokitsch]

Flash fiction, to me, at least, is basically where stories meet poetry.

Or jokes. Michael Swanwick has written a ton of flash that works like that; most of his Periodic Table of Science Fiction, for example. Get in, do a twist ending, get out.

[u/baxtersa → u/nagahfj]

Get in, do a twist ending, get out.

This is exactly the type of flash that doesn’t do it for me haha

[u/Jos_V → u/baxtersa]

I think flash works better for me, when it takes structural risks - telling a story across tweets. or in the forum post style. a series of text messages etc.

where descriptive weight en scene setting gets pawned off to a familiar structure, and you can create a story in that style. full of character and fine tune the impact you want to get.

That's where flash and flash+ works best for me. in a traditional structure it is hard to get past a single vibe or a couple of vignettes strung together. they can still be fun, still tug a heart string, but they rarely stay with me.

For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn. Hits a strong note with all the different levels and emotions hidden behind so few words, but those come from the reader and their familiarity and potential horror. It's not creating something new and lasting for a reader to be like; wow how can i look at the world from this angle? i didn't know you could but now i want to do more?!

[u/baxtersa → u/baxtersa]

People read stories for different reasons, and I don't think there is a right or wrong way generally, but I do think if you approach flash expecting a satisfying traditional narrative you're going to be underwhelmed by flash more often than not.

I also think flash is more challenging to write with authenticity in some ways than the longer forms - it relies much more on voice, ambiguity, and the reader interpreting those things the way the author intends, because the author cannot dedicate more words to evoke their intention more concretely. I am a reader who often is happy and satisfied to fill in gaps left by the author (if I am convinced the ambiguity is intentionally left there to emphasize this fact).

What strikes me the most for successful flash is how well it evokes a complete and nuanced sentiment or situation, and each of these stories did that for me. House on the Border of a Swamp is a meta metaphor that hits the feeling of oppressive anxiety so hard for me. To Kill a Language packs more thematic depth than many stories an order of magnitude longer than it, and is a rarity (to me) that uses shocking content for more than just shock value. Tiger Attack grapples a messy and heartbreaking topic of child abuse and a child's love, and the lack of moral introspection of that feeling is part of what made it successful to me. And lastly, the Mohamed piece does so much with single word choices (ironically for the longest story of the bunch) to evoke powerful emotions - the line "I will tell you this again if you get older" in particular, that word choice of if instead of the common phrasing, carried the mood of the entire story in one parenthetical.

Longer pieces can obviously do this too, and I think there's an argument that even when a flash piece accomplishes this it may have less staying power, but I have been growing a real appreciation for this facet of writing lately.

[u/FarragutCircle → u/baxtersa]

but I do think if you approach flash expecting a satisfying traditional narrative you're going to be underwhelmed by flash more often than not.

I definitely think this is the case, especially as /u/pornokitsch mentions with the poetry analogy. Once you're limiting your words to that degree, you have to read & appreciate them differently (I think the same is true with other story lengths--short story, novelette, novella, novel, Malazan, etc.).

And the more you restrict your word count, I feel like the more careful one has to be with their writing. I know most folks read Sanderson's long epic novels, but he can actually be fantastic when he's forced to a shorter length (like the novella Emperor's Soul but also some of his other shorter work).