I am interested in the journey from flash fiction to the novel.
I am not just interested in the journey as a scholar would be, I am interested in undertaking said journey myself. I don’t even know if it’s possible – I’m not aware of any novelist I admire who went by that route. Except perhaps Nabokov who wrote his novels from index cards, in fragments (cp. “The Original of Laura”).
John Gardner, in “The Art of Fiction”, mentions “fictional pointillism” as a possible structure for large-scale works and gives Coover as an example for a writer who mastered this form – Cortazar comes to my mind as well – what Gardner says is worth reproducing here at length:
In this form the writer lets out his story in snippets, sometimes called ‘crots’, moving as if at random from one point to another, gradually amassing the elements, literal and symbolic, of a quasi-energetic action. No rules governs the organization of such a work but that the writer be a prose-poet of genius. Even if he has some intellectual system for arranging his crots, the basic principle of his assembly is feeling: He shuffles and reshuffles his fragments to find the most moving of possible presentations, and he achieves his climaxes not, as in linear fiction, by the gelling of key events, but by poetic force. Depending, as it does, so largely on texture – having abandoned structure in the traditional sense (events causally related and presented more or less in sequence) – the mode runs the great risk of overrichness, the writer’s tendency to push too hard, producing an effect of sentimentality. The great advantage, on the other hand, is the necessary focus on imagery whereby repeated iages accrue greater and greater psychological and symbolic force.
It does sound as if this is something that I may use for my own journey to the novel. Perhaps other flash fictionistas feel similarly. I believe that my own fiction so far avoids the abovementioned risk by being humorous and by having a tendency to pulsate even in short bursts of 100-200 words (here’s an example). When there is no pulsating, no coming back to boring ground, you get pure Pynchon where every line counts but there’s also no relief ever from the poetic persuasion of the author.
So – watch me shuffle my flash cards at the usual place for the next year or so.
Of lately, I have personally been honing my attention away from the ‘proper approaches’ of writing which I find create nothing expansive BUT I seek writers such as yourself Finnegan (and currently Carla Manzoni’s wonderful series “Merc” (on facebook) which pushes into a soft-dimensional curve, which allows space for the mind to enter, occupy, and become…
I find those who pursue the common elements of writing like meth addicts, to be dishonest to themselves as writers, and a bit whingers to their readers (‘See… I can write such grand linear narratives, as I push the button of dogma once again…’).
I understand, Finnegan, and one must pursue what one must. Sad for me as a reader if you move away from flash – but as a writer, I hear you.
sam – thank you – but the route gardner is proposing here, as i understand it, leads through a garden of earthly flashly delights to a novel consisting of all the flowers of this garden. i was looking exactly for that: a way that lets me keep writing flash but points the way to a larger whole …
thanks hazar – i don’t know much about those “proper approaches” and much like you i enjoy stomping through new, exciting hunting grounds, rifle at the ready… (and my recaptchas for this reply were, fittingly, “other pollen”!)
This is a spectacular idea, something along the lines of my own thinking lately… I must send you a long email, soon, my friend. Tell me, have you read David Shields’ Reality Hunger? It’s about fiction and nonfiction so not really what you’re after here, but stylistically it shares some things with this idea of yours. The notion that different parts of a larger work can appear wholly unrelated but form the whole is something I am working on myself, too. I am into this idea,as I think it reflects reality of our 21st C existence. Also, I just read a short column about how Flash ignited a writer’s zeal but then killed her novel. I don’t think it has to be this way at all. But really, I should write that longer email and get off your page for now. Thumbs up to this, FF, I think you are onto something marvelous!!
michelle, thanks – i haven’t finished shields’ “reality hunger” but i have it and i like it, too, both its structure and the central message. did you see his interview in the millions (here)? he talks more about his style of creating non-fiction there. now, i believe (with gardner) that non-fiction and fiction are governed by completely different laws because they’re meant to achieve totally different things but the similarities are worth mining.
Hello, Mr Flawnt. I was chatting the other day about the possibility of dissembling a novel into a series of flash pieces with the option of reassembling it later as a related-flash sequence/collection to form a more complex story. Not in series form – but standalone modules. Initially we were thinking cardboard sandwich filler, but it could be a series of hyperlinked webpages. For me it’s a future thing, by dint of having a novel (trad) to finish first. So many words and only 8 fingers. It ain’t good maths.
martha, cannot tell you how pleased i am about the comments on my little thought piece. thank you, too. your re/assembling technique sounds very interesting, too. i think the key question really is if you get the complexity cocktail cooking that any (good) novel represents…the hyperlinking is a good idea, too. susan gibb may have done something like it…and good luck with that novel (trad) before another novel (exp) …
Finnegan, what I like about this, is that you do not have to “disappear” to write a novel. Writing flash, is also then not going to intrude on your novel, as every piece is (possibly) a part of the novel.
Especially with us being so short on time, this may be the perfect journey to take!
actually, folks, as some if not all of you may have read on facebook, i have come to the inevitable conclusion that i will have to “disappear” to really make this change – and no more flash either. so i hope you understand, i’ll be thinking of you.