Randall Brown: A Third Way

In The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field (2009), Night Train co-founder Rusty Barnes writes, “Somewhere between the linear narrative and the post-postmodern fracturing of narrative, there might be a third way, dependent on its brevity as its primary descriptor” (136). Since first encountering Barnes’s idea, I’ve been fascinated by its implications. I’ve begun to refer to contemporary very short forms as “compressed fictions,” but they have many other names: twitter fiction, hint fiction, micro fiction, one-sentence stories, flash fiction, sudden fiction, quick fiction, pocket fiction, and so on. Each label compresses fiction to a specific word/character limit, but Barnes’s quote hints at something beyond the constraints of characters and words: “There might be a third way.” A third way to what?

If indeed the world has fractured, and the traditional linear narrative can no longer capture its truths, then the post-postmodern answer is to reflect the world as it truly is (or as its writers perceive the world truly to be), and hence the broken narrative. However, imagine instead of taking up the shards of the shattered world and piecing them together in some new form with the cracks and the process of sequencing them visible (narrative that is aware of itself as narrative), the writer chooses Barnes’s third way.

In doing so, in choosing brevity, the writer picks up one of these shards and views it as complete in itself. Working within the constraints of that infinitesimal space, the writer creates something whole. Compression factors into the process of working with the (very) tiny, but afterwards, compression also works upon the piece as product, continuing to impose itself upon the work. In This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey: Essays (2009), Steve Almond writes, “Writing is decision making. Nothing more and nothing less. What word? Where to place the comma? How to shape the paragraph? Which characters to undress and in what matter. It’s relentless” (7). Working with compression forces new questions upon the writer: “How to make something so tiny matter? How to imply the history? How to tell the reader all that can be told about the character when working against the wordiness of exposition? How to make words do double, triple, quadruple duty? How to create reader-identification in so little time?” Ad infinitum.

Each writer, of course, might meet the demands of compression with different questions. Once written, compression has a tendency to make each word count (both literally and figuratively), to give extra weight to each choice the writer makes, to release the power of synecdoche (a force that makes each tiny particular thing represent a larger, universal something), to make readers more aware of rhythms and repetitions, and so on.

Oh yes. That question: A third way to what? Is it a third way to tell stories or is it a way to tell something other than the story? In most of these compressed fictions, I feel narrative’s  meaning-making apparatus at work: the inciting incident leading to a confrontation fraught with challenge and obstacles leading to insight, understanding, transformation, an emotional truth.  It’s submerged, implied, hinted at, a single word the whole of the back story, the title its inciting incident, a deleted world the whole of the subtext. Sometimes I feel something else at work, maybe a sense of capturing a literal truth rather than a metaphorical one, the desire to see, for example, a dragonfly as a dragonfly, much like a haiku might.

A third way to what? Perhaps just another way for writers to express themselves, their insights, their experience. For writer and reader, it is perhaps as Stephen King in On Writing describes it: “We’ve engaged in an act of telepathy. Not mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy.”

Writers working with compression and their compressed messages convey their “minds” through what to some readers, especially those used to more lengthy narratives, might read as secret spy messages: “The buffalo howl at the heavens, pretending to be coyotes.”  There is something of Eliot’s “objective correlative” to it: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” Imagine a compressed piece titled “Before the Shooting.” The challenge, then, might be for the writer to find that particular arrangement of words and images and sentences to engage in real telepathy, not just so readers can see what the writer sees, but to feel it, too—and perhaps also to see and feel beyond the writer’s perception; or the challenge might be something entirely else, depending upon how that individual writer views compression’s constraints and challenges.

To me, compression is a third way to figure things out: about myself, others, the world, what has been, what might be, an aging parent, crippling panic, and so on. Surely, one way to figure things out is to have characters act & fail, over and over, each time gaining a greater understanding of what they face and what’s require of them to overcome it. Other times, it’s not that easy.

Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, has written that, because the words we use to capture the reality of our world have been placed upon the world arbitrarily, our words can never fully capture the truth of our existence.  But we try — word after word, sentence after sentence, breath after breath trying to grasp an essence that will always elude us. Maybe that too appeals to me about a compressed fiction, its desire for the perfect word (what a teacher of mine, Terri Brown-Davison, referred to as “fixity”), the right word after right word for the right slot, as if such a thing were possible, as if that fragment of the broken world upon which we’ve written our tiny fictions were the world entire, before things fell, before words became separated from the Real, like the compressed moment before the Big Bang, before time, history, narrative, the fall of apples and towers, this tiniest moment that contained within it the all of everything.

Randall Brown’s reviews appear in numerous issues of LAR. He is the author of the award-winning flash fiction collection Mad to Live. He directs and teaches at Rosemont College’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. He appears in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field and in The Norton Anthology of Hint Fiction. He’s also the founder of Matter Press, its online magazine The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and the blog FlashFiction.Net.