resonance – The Novella-in-Flash

Novella-in-Flash Writing Prompt #22 – Shifts and Transitions

Here’s a wonderful short-short story (in this case, creative non-fiction) published several years ago in Brevity, by Tami Mohamed Brown:

https://brevitymag.com/nonfiction/three-oranges/

I love the clarity and directness of this story’s narration. To take an obvious example, how about the simplicity of the arrival of the stranger? It takes a certain kind of writerly boldness to use a separate paragraph of only two plain words: “He approaches.” Another writer might have worried that this wasn’t enough, that the reader needed to be told how he approaches. Yet adding a fussy clarification could dilute the impact of the dramatic action – the approach itself is the thing, and in the starkness of those two words there’s a hint of an encroaching. Let’s call this Shift #1.

Elsewhere, in the set-up of the story, Brown makes skillful and judicious use of descriptive background detail: just enough is sketched, in order to conjure pictures for the reader and give a sense of atmosphere, without anything being over-egged:

“Across the street is a car dealership, used cars for sale, rows of American flags flying high above, but otherwise, no one else but us and the freeway, buzzing in the background.”

How discretely that description politicises the story! In another deft paragraph of description soon afterwards, I’m reminded of Shira Erlichman’s mantra for writers “Sensuality > Concepts”:

“The guy’s carrying a huge garbage bag, wearing army fatigues, cuffs fraying at the bottom, cap pulled tight over his forehead, a stained red vest over a dingy long-sleeved shirt.”

We don’t need to be told more about this stranger to understand.

Then notice how a sudden moment of error (a conversational misstep after a question) is allowed by the story to resonate fully, like a swear word audible at a dinner party that has suddenly gone silent: “And as soon as I’ve said it, I feel a little stupid. A little small… There is a pause. Nothing between us but the sound of the rush-hour traffic.”

Let’s say the question + the misstep of the response which immediately follows = Shift #2. The writer here trusts enough in the dramatic energy of her material that she can self-consciously slow down the story and linger upon this new moment.

The questioner responds slightly threateningly (“[moving] his hands wildly around his face… an imitation of someone’s worst nightmare street-version of the boogeyman”), which might be considered Shift #3. Then, with a light touch, Tami Mohamed Brown moves the story naturally into a Carveresque moment: the questioner yearns for a self-awareness that’s a kind of self-doubling (Shift #4):

“If I could get outside myself—if I could stand outside myself and look in for just a little bit—what would I see?… Would I see a crazy riffraff guy, a bum? Would I see something terrible?”

(The reader’s interest, now, has been balanced equally between the narrator and the stranger. The story has shown both figures wrestling with their consciousness, self-doubting: firstly in the ripples within the narrator’s 1st person POV reflections, and secondly we’ve been shown the other character’s existential uncertainty through his dialogue.)

And I love how, having explored various ideas of awkwardness and profundity, the story changes gears yet again (Shift #5) before it ends – slipping into a mood of casual lightness and joy:

“He tosses the orange back and forth, from one hand to the other, as if he were juggling more, under the streetlight. I applaud. He stops and bows, hands together in a Namaste, bending deeply from the waist. He straightens.”

And finally, at the resonant close, there’s that exquisite final moment of ambiguous and unresolved epiphany (Shift #6), which I’ll leave you to discover and enjoy.

https://brevitymag.com/nonfiction/three-oranges/

So many lovely little transitions in this scene of less than 750 words! Truly a marvel of balance and concision, a wondrous small gem of writing craft.

How might you weave subtle and multiple transitions like these into your writing? Might you introduce a change of mood before the end – joyful to poignant/bittersweet or vice versa? Or introduce moments of self-reflection/self-scrutiny? Might a character misjudge something or do something unwise? Might there be a transcendent epiphany – a discovery of sorts? Might you shift the spotlight, through dialogue, from one character’s struggle to another’s (without changing the POV)?

Here are some prompts you might use to get going, following Tami Mohamed Brown’s story:

Novella-in-Flash Writing Prompt #21 – Going Further with Character – via William James’s Theory of Identity

William James and the Constituents of the Self

William James, brother of novelist Henry James and diarist Alice James, was a leading 19th century philosopher and one of the founders of modern psychology.

In his book The Principles of Psychology (1890), a publication that is often credited with making the idea of “stream of consciousness” more widely known in Western culture, one of the things he does (in Chapter 10) is name and describe three distinct aspects of human experience: the material self, the social self, and the spiritual self.

Photo by Marty O’Neill on Unsplash

Story writers can have fun exploring fictional characters via the triple lens of these categories, and using them to uncover new insights:

(a) The material Self, for example…

the body
clothes
possessions
home
family (as we share common genes)
things we have made

Invitation: When you consider the material aspects of your main characters’ lives (as listed above), what specific details of their experience might you newly identify and describe? Feel free to indulge all five senses, where relevant, as you write, and include sensory details. Try writing a good page or two (or three!) of notes that you might use as texture informing (explicitly or implicitly) the stories/chapters themselves later on.

(b) The social Self, for example…

Novella-in-Flash Writing Prompt #20 – Finding Resonance in Objects and Belongings

What do the objects and random detritus contained in a character’s environment say about that person?

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

Here’s a wonderful, award-winning story from Sara Hills in which a character is partly understood by the belongings encountered in their room:

https://www.smokelong.com/stories/hey-lisa-i-hope-you-like/

Notice how Hills describes the narrator discovering new things about the character, through the objects she encounters in his room. The narrator feels she ought to have known these things already, and her sense of the other person is therefore destabilised. Notice too, how before the microfiction reaches its end-point, the narrator starts envisioning the other person within the context of the objects in the room, and then how the real-world situation suddenly changes for the narrator, in a surprising shift of the action. Also note how the key physical object of the mixtape in the story is naturally imbued with an emotion that has parallel relevance for the wider story context, as a mixtape is associated with nostalgia, obsolescence (of a technological kind), and relationship (since mixtapes are often given as gifts), and so the emotions inherent in the object have resonance for the overall themes of a story about loss.

Invitation: Pick one of the following writing prompts and create a new scene/story, or (if you prefer) try sketching out some “notes-towards-a-story”: