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:
Continue reading Novella-in-Flash Writing Prompt #22 – Shifts and Transitions
The Novella-in-Flash 