Notes on Smart Fiction
In the final ninety seconds after being beheaded by her husband in 1838, Ta Chin thinks “…but I press my feet side by side and wiggle my toes this last time and whisper to them goodbye I know what is before me…” which finds representation in a book nearly 170 years later. Anne Boleyn, who met a similar fate at the behest of Henry VIII in 1536, and Medusa, after being subjected to similar violence by Perseus in 2000 BC, are some others whose final thoughts are in that book. A chicken, beheaded in 1958 in Alabama, has its last thoughts recorded too. More “talking heads” have theirs in that book too, including the actress Jayne Mansfield, novelist Yukio Mishima, a Viet Minh guerrilla leader, a Texan farmer, and John the Baptist. The one who pens down their thoughts is decapitated on the job in 2008 but manages to register his final words too.
What am I talking about? Here’s an additional note: Each of the accounts is exactly 240 words in length. And there are exactly sixty-two of those.
Baffled? Well, I’m talking of Severance, a collection of sixty-two stories by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler, each 240 words in length, spanning 40,000 years of human (and occasionally nonhuman) history. Told with the intensity of a poet and the wit of a great story-teller, Butler excels in capturing the flow of thoughts and feelings that go through a person’s mind after their head has been severed. It’s not arbitrary either. The collection is built on the intersection of two seemingly unrelated concepts: One, that the human head is believed to remain in a state of consciousness for one and one-half minutes after decapitation; and second, in a heightened state of emotion, people speak at the rate of 160 words per minute. So that’s 240 words managing to illuminate and crystallize the lives of real and imaginary characters and the worlds they inhabit. Such a creative feat is unlikely to be replicated.
Isn’t that fascinating? It struck me as more so this past week because last week was 2023’s Flash Flood submission window. Inviting stories of less than 300 words from writers around the world in preparation for National Flash Fiction Day in June, the process is fast and furious. The euphoria (and heartbreak) among practitioners of the tiniest form of fiction was palpable across the community.
Severance appeared in 2006, by which date Sudden fiction or Short-short fiction or Flash fiction had already captured readers’ imagination. Its sustainability over the years, however, depended on, as it does till date, on innovation and risk-taking, towards which the book is a great example.
Sudden or Flash Fiction uses the semantics, suggestiveness, rhythm and elliptical leaps of poetry while aiming for the semblance of a narrative arc to rightfully claim its position within the realm of fiction. Economy of language necessitates wise word choices to advance the plot and define characters through one or more startling images.
Advancing Hemingway’s ‘Iceberg theory’ and putting the crux of it in Einstein’s words, let me say that only a writer who understands the plot really well can put it in the simplest and briefest form — like the iceberg, with one-eighth of it underwater.
Flash fiction, to me, is also Smart fiction. And I’m not even talking about how it fits in a pocket, affords on-screen reading and is just right for a smoke-long break! I think practitioners of Flash fiction trust their readers like they’d a Smartphone. For example, I do my thing and trust the reader’s smartness to fill in the missing parts. In that respect, I place a high priority on the reader. I have faith that they have similar knowledge, experience and sensibilities to paint the background (and sometimes even the foreground) of where and when the characters take off and do their thing. There’s the dazzle of the initial spark in the opening, but beyond that, the reader is invited to be a participant in the proceedings. Readers are free to loiter and linger within the piece, find meaning through slow and careful reading. Finally, they’re expected to leave wondering about the greater, deeper impact of things that are alluded to, and only just alluded to, in the piece. I think this aspect of completeness and shared involvement, in spite of extreme brevity, is under-appreciated to this day as regards the standing of Flash fiction alongside big brothers Short-story and Novel.
Short-short fiction has its share of critics including: a) that it is the diet of ‘emailing, texting, abbreviating generation;’ b) that the existence of too many publishing venues, especially those existing only on the internet, will lead to ‘oversaturation’ in a short period of time; and c) that it is ‘literary tokenism.’ But so far so good.
As Flash Flood keeps posting country names from where entries have been accepted (akin to the medal roll call of a sporting event!), it increasingly bears testimony that Flash fiction has been successful in transcending regions and demographics, and comes across as a celebration of the art form and its wide embrace.
