One Lent as a child, I gave up talking for 40 days which ended up, of course, in abject failure. Unfortunately, I’ve always been one of those loquacious girls who trip from tangent to tangent in every conversation, like a gnat looking for somewhere to light, but never satisfied anywhere. At the first of my writing life, an experienced novelist dictated: One thought per sentence.
One thought per sentence.
As the years have passed, brevity, in writing at least, has become a sacred ambition. Revising a story to the finest point possible may be the most satisfying part of making that story for the writer of it, because as the story’s first reader, the writer is clarifying the actual flow of it, almost as if the writer is pointing at the story with an outstretched forefinger: There … right there….no not to the left or right…but exactly there. Not that thing, but this thing, is the story’s reality. Making that reality precise and fully understandable is the goal and the joy.
Chekhov’s “Extreme brevity” is also the approach that helps a story work. Not many writers reveal their ‘secret sauce,’ but David Jauss’ seminal AWP essay, “The Lever of Transcendence: Contradiction and the Physics of Creativity,” proves that a story must have paradox and/or contradiction within it. Communicating exactly what the nature of that paradox or contraction actually is in the particular story requires that the sentences, even the actual language chosen, be sharpened to hit the reader’s consciousness precisely. Extra words simply blunt the effect.
Cutting words out of a story, and especially out of each and every actual sentence is a bit like sculpting …. The better it is done, and sometimes the brutality of what is cut, can engage each reader’s imagination and thereby increase the intensity of the reader’s experience with it.
Psychologists refer to a phenomenon called ‘magical thinking.’ People, and especially children, who experience something outside the realm of their ordinary lives create a narrative to put the new experience into their old context. The mind tries to make sense of what is not immediately understandable.
A hyper-short story has much that is unknown --- and highly sculpted stories may seem to have many holes that the reader’s imagination – the connotations of words or even their prejudices and current personal life situations – is engaged. In this way, the reader is making their own story out of what they are actually reading, If the story has a prayer of being universal, then to my mind, this may be the vehicle for it.
I am not claiming that hyper-short fiction is alone in the necessity to aggressively revise. We see such radical craft in most types of writing. I’d argue that even memoir or essays do something quite similar. When the writer is sharing their experiences succinctly, yet still expressing essentials, the vision of the writer resonates with the reader/listener, pulling the imaginative consciousness to itself.
For hyper-short fiction, what we often term ‘flash fiction,’ such aggressive cutting is essential in the extreme.
Dangers abound here of course. The resulting intensity of well-done hyper-short fiction can flummox the reader. Sometimes it renders almost impossible to digest many of them at one sitting. Like many deep and/or new emotions, for a full experience of the emotion must be ‘sat with’ for a bit to process entirely. Reading many of them at once can feel like a battering ram, or a strobe light. Even with the strobe light effect, the mark can be entirely missed – too much left out for understandability, words too weak or too strong to convey the forces at play in the story.
Still, even with these dangers, my personal reason for writing short is my fascination with single moments in time … and the challenge of showing exactly what makes up or leads to, the elements of a particular moment, a particular contradiction or paradox, for an individual character. Writing short may be extraordinarily difficult but it has the potential to bring to life that particular present moment for me and for the next reader of that story.
I often describe myself as having an outward life on the one hand, and an inward life on the other hand. The outward life is loquacious – a series of tangents, distractions and sometimes even obsessive repetitions of actions/thoughts/happenings: the laundry, the kids, doing dishes, etc. etc. etc.
The inward life, however, is one I want to be as focused as possible, each moment attended by my entire mind and heart and body. I could not live without either life. The inward life must have outward life as a vehicle for connection with life, and the outward life must have the inward one to discover meaning within it. Both though, exist only at a moment in time – a short, fleeting present moment.
All the life we human beings really have IS that present, that Sacred Present. And that is why I write short.
Cynthia’s latest offering Forms of Defiance is now available.
“The Lever of Transcendence” and other of David Jauss’ craft essays may be found in On Writing Fiction: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom about the Craft or in Alone with All that Can Happen from Writers’ Digest Books.
