{"id":1244,"date":"2024-02-26T12:00:15","date_gmt":"2024-02-26T12:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/?p=1244"},"modified":"2025-01-23T11:34:24","modified_gmt":"2025-01-23T11:34:24","slug":"flash-fiction-and-the-paradox-of-constraint","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/flash-fiction-and-the-paradox-of-constraint\/","title":{"rendered":"Flash Fiction and the Paradox of Constraint"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This spring our Contemporary Cultures of Writing research group is collaborating with Milton Keynes Literary Festival to run The long and short of it: From flash fiction to the doorstop novel\u00a0<\/a>\u2013 a series of online and in-person conversations between OU creative writing scholars and acclaimed authors. We\u2019re kicking off the series at 7pm Monday 4 March with an online event with flash writer Electra Rhodes<\/a>, who\u2019ll be in discussion with Open University PhD student Gwyneth Jones.<\/strong><\/em><\/h3>\n

To whet your appetite, Gwyneth shares here why she likes to keep things small.<\/strong><\/em><\/h3>\n

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\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

Flash fiction, which tells a complete story in just a few hundred words, takes brevity as its starting point and as permission to break rules. It holds in tension the practice of narration (the art of spinning out events in an engaging way) and techniques of concision (eliminating all but the most necessary) to imply much more than is actually on the page.<\/p>\n

I began writing flash fiction about seven years ago, fascinated by the way it can use form as content and by the way the writer enfolds meaning for the reader to discover. Flash is neither easy nor quick to write, but it does offer great freedom to experiment.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>Things that might be difficult to sustain or that would become exceedingly tedious in longer form fiction can be creatively explored within the sandbox of flash. Unusual points of view for instance, unusual tenses (future conditional, perhaps?), or alphabet games. Some inspiration for this comes from the Oulipo Group<\/a> who impose strange external restrictions to gain writerly freedom \u2013 Oulipians are said to be \u2018like rats building a labyrinth from which they plan to escape\u2019. These are some of my labyrinths.<\/p>\n

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Unusual Point of View<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Life<\/a>

Life on the Margins: And other stories from the Scottish Arts Trust Story Awards (Volume 2)<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

Writing in second person can be slightly disconcerting for the reader who is asked to identify with the \u2018you\u2019 of the narrative. This is an excerpt from my flash fiction \u2018Not Lost or Drowned\u2019 published in Life on the Margins<\/em><\/a>, about a woman escaping from a toxic relationship.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re staying alone in a caravan. You walk to pass the time. Sometimes you take the bus into town, cruising past trinket shops. You see missing posters, signs of desperation, fly-posted along the coast. She has, or had, the same name as you. Unsettling to see it there above a number to call, day or night. You memorise it, test yourself at the next poster, and the next, till you know it by heart.<\/p>\n

Fibonacci Sequences <\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

Book Cover: The Real Jazz Baby – Reflex Fiction Volume Two<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

That is, writing in sentence lengths that correspond to the Fibonacci sequence where the last two numbers are added together to make the next (e.g. 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21, etc). The rigidity of form compels the writer to add and\/or subtract words with potentially unexpected results. I wrote \u2018Aint no Cure for my Fibonacci Blues\u2019 (published in The Real Jazz Baby) <\/em><\/a>\u00a0inspired by summer holidays with my slightly batty aunt. It opens with two one-word sentences and builds up to a fifty-five-word sentence and then back down. This is the ending:<\/p>\n

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Lipograms<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Oulipo group often devised lipograms \u2013 omitting one or more letters of the alphabet. The letter e, of course, is the hardest. I tried this in \u2018No e in Pornography\u2019 about a man whose \u2018browsing history rats him out\u2019 which was published online by Reflex Flash. I think the lack of e gives the writing a spikey brittle quality.<\/p>\n

Not so sorry, thinks Nina, for abnormal cravings. Not sorry to bring havoc to Nina\u2019s world. In outwardly lax administrations, such things flourish with abandon. Sonny looks long at icons of dissipation; nothing is off limits to a thin bald man with roving digits.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Breathless Paragraph<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

A form quite common in flash fiction is \u2018the breathless paragraph\u2019, that is, maybe three or four hundred words, written as one continuous sentence. This can result in a soaring arc of narrative or a relentless sense of inevitability. \u2018Exegesis\u2019 was published in the anthology In Defence of Pseudoscience<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

They\u2019ll say she was asking for it, look at her, in her cheap skirt, scuffed heels, bitten nails and it\u2019s obvious how she started out, a skinny, snot-nosed kid off the estate, no pony rides or chocolate eclairs for her, no, it was all \u2018never mind your homework, mind your brothers,\u2019 coz her mother was on tablets for her nerves, and what can you expect, absent father, feckless mother, things like that make a girl grow up fast, start using what she\u2019s got to get where she wants,\u00a0 but as the saying goes, fruit doesn\u2019t fall far \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some other examples of experimental flash fiction from some brilliant writers:<\/p>\n