Arranging & Uncramping Our Stories

“Decongest your pages. Triple space. Leave wide margins. Use paragraphing the same way you would use any trick of your trade—play with it, make it work for you, not confine you. The white spaces count too—you are making a visually-perceived work of art. Play with it.”

-Gordon Lish

I have found that paying attention to how a story appears visually on the page is an often overlooked part of the craft, and yet it is crucial.

Not only does our freedom in this regard allow us to experiment with music and rhythm, it helps us to showcase a story’s underlying emotions. The way lines are placed and the way in which literal white space is worked with can be as vital to how a story FEELS as what is being said with words.

Much can be done creatively in terms of a story’s “layout”. In fact, by decongesting our lines, we can change the way a piece is understood. I have come to think this aspect of craft is deserving of more attention.

Sometimes our stories simply need the wide open sky of a page. It is not dissimilar to the way an artist makes use of the large, blank canvas. As flash fiction writers we make our own rules, and reinvent what we do each time. In this way we are very much like visual artists.

As a study, with my story “Specialist” below (originally published in Bending Genres) I found that dividing each disjunctive expression into it’s own “mini-chapter”, offering each chapter a title, became the unconventional key to its success. The original story draft was set in a a conventional paragraph structure it did not live up to its potential.

Please feel free to leave comments relating to this topic below. It is always wonderful to read your thoughts and discuss.

Enjoy!

Specialist

Meg Pokrass

From Bending Genres

Car

One evening my car burps and dies. I point to the place where the car has always felt sick.

Dog

“Most of our things are already ruined,” my man says, pointing to the chewed chair legs, scratched hardwood floors. Lately his voice sounds like a permanent sticker. No taking this dog back.

Yes. He wants someone to clap.

Specialist

It’s believing he’s a specialist about your life, that can get to you.
Or what will happen next.


Crater-Sized

Is the dog heavy from his last life?

He’s a mystery, a TYPE of dog, with crater-sized ownership gaps.

He poops cautiously, his large body bowed into a curl, forming a big letter C while I stand waiting with compostable waste bag. He glances quickly around to make sure nobody else is watching.

Figure

Men can fly to the moon but I cannot have a child. The doctors love me, that is… they touch my shoulder when they explain in doctor language why I am sterile. Periods like broken crockery.


No Way

“Don’t tell me to get rid of this fucking dog.”


Blacklight

I think about army cousin Jim. Generous with his illness — he offered it secretly when I was just getting leg hair, telling me one tricky night when Ma was asleep, that I was so damn pretty now.

When a man talks to you like that and you have always been ugly you answer with your lips.

He says, “Ahhh”.

Crockery

When my man tells me to fix the car, fix the dog, fix my hair… I keep his words close but I do not touch them.