Lawrence Coates and "Bats"

Reading great flash fiction gives us everything we need to learn as writers of the form

“A short-short is, in some sense, a drama of sentences. Each sentence must fascinate on its own, but also impel a reader to the next sentence.”-Lawrence Coates

I would love for you all to read Lawrence Coates’ story “Bats”, winner of the Barthelme Prize for Short Prose. It is a story I study and teach and hold dear to my heart as the years go by. I feel it is a masterclass in what a tiny piece can accomplish. After you read it, consider what Coates has written about his marvellous ending below. As you know, endings fascinate me. And “Bats” lands it just right.

“If the sentences in a short-short impel by posing questions or intriguing the reader, the very last sentence has something in it that answers questions without posing a new one.” -Lawrence Coates

Prompt from “Bats”

Write a story with 2 mismatched elements and see if you can make surreal sense of it. Use incredibly details specifics as the author does in “Bats”. And in the spirit of “Bats”, perhaps you can show us something beautiful and mysterious, something that we have never seen before in quite that way. See if you can tie the two mismatched elements together without telling us what to think. Trust the reader with every breath.

• A thundercloud in a grocery store

• Your first lover in a retirement home

• Blue cheese in a child’s stroller

• A dream inside a backpack

• A slice of watermelon on a sofa.

• Ukulele in a rusty old car

  

  Photo by Zdeněk Macháček on Unsplash