Flash fiction and Illogical Grace...
If you’re sitting around thinking “I’m too sad to write today” keep in mind that this is a day you may want to be writing because it’s close. If you’re sitting around thinking “I’m too angry to write today” try harnessing that stress and riding it like wild, untameable animal.
I love flash fiction pieces that are not at all right-brain rational. Pieces that are filled with longing, urgency, sadness, poetry— something not ever expressed in just that way before.
Memorable flash contains a kind of illogical grace. Harnessing oneself to an emotion is how we get there— and it’s like strapping oneself to a shooting star.
The best flash fiction lives in a dreamlike burst of meaning. For the reader it’s like looking up at the bright desert sky at night and thinking—I don’t need to see anything else to know I’m human.
The key to making this happen as a writer lives in how deeply we feel it.
It is very much like love itself.
Prompt: Read the below stories and, drawing from an emotional place that feels close to you, write a story set in a strange land , ie the desert, Siberia, etc. For an additional challenge see if you can incorporate one or more of the following words or images: drift, velvety, husband, mushroom, ghost, puffy tree, feather
Paid subscribers, please feel free to post your stories in the comments section. I look so forward to reading them!
A few Examples:
The Day Before You Find Blackberries Shoved Under the Cabin Door by Frankie McMillan
Somnambulist
She does not know how long she has been lost.
Her head is adrift with strangers made from feathers and velvet. Inside the room with no context, she searches for meaning, but cannot remember what it should look like. The hours rush by—turbulent, disheveled, dazzled with the sound of hurricane, as she lies in a fever of nerves and blood. Real sleep eludes her. Walking the halls looking for it to take back to the room with her, she steps past other beds sheet-white as ghosts. An attendant comes to steer her back from where she emerged whispering nonsense about fate and hope. Is that why, when her husband comes to her, he leaves in tears?
When she finally sleeps, she dreams of a silent woman sitting by her bed. Somehow she understands that when they finally speak, the two of them will resume their conversation at precisely the point where they left off. When the visitor holds a cup to the patient’s pale lips, the drink is strong, strange, and drawn from no well. It does not taste of suffering.