Honing the Power of Suggestion With Flash Fiction

Tips for making the biggest impact with the fewest words.

- GRANT FAULKNER

When I’m writing a story, I think often of Roland Barthes’ question in The Pleasure of the Text: “Is not the most erotic portion of the body where the garment gapes?”

I don’t write romance, and I don’t write many sex scenes in my stories, but it’s the perfect writing metaphor for me, especially when I’m writing flash fiction, because tiny stories flow from tantalizing glimpses that lure the reader forward. As much as a writer might want to tell the whole story, a good miniature is created around hints and fleeting appearances. The story moves through the power of suggestion; it lives in the bliss of its mystery.

Before I wrote flash fiction, which is defined as a story less than 1,000 words, I’d trained myself as a novelist, and I thought writing vividly meant to write with a density of telling details, with words that grounded a reader and illustrated the world around them almost as if the author held a movie camera. That can be the case, certainly, but the more I wrote flash fiction (and particularly 100-word stories), the more I learned that there are other tools a writer can use to immerse the reader in the story: the art of excision, the art of compression, the art of omission, the art of writing with spaces and gaps and breaths, the art of less.

I recently wrote a book, The Art of Brevity, to better understand the craft of writing less. Here is how writing flash fiction taught me to write with the power of suggestion.

The Unexpected Benefits of Constraints

The word constraints tends to have a negative connotation. It speaks of restrictions and limits, and in writing, as in life, we tend to want as much freedom and space as we can get. But constraints can nourish your creativity.