100-Word Stories: Writing with Gaps
April 29, 2014 § 15 Comments
A guest post from Grant Faulkner, co-founder of 100 Word Story, the magazine that makes Brevity look verbose:
Writers are presumed to be lovers of words. They’re called wordsmiths, praised for their lyricism, and celebrated for capturing telling details. Stories are built through text, after all, so we strive to learn the fine art of vivid verbs, hone an ear for dialogue, and absorb new vocabulary. These are all valuable tools, but one of the most important tools of writing can be neglected by attending only to the words of a story. I call that tool “minding the gaps.”
I’m speaking about the gaps between words, sentences, paragraphs—the gaps around a story itself. Such gaps determine a story’s contours, its aesthetic. What is left out of a story is as important as what is included because life moves as much through disconnections as connections. Think of the gulf between two lovers, a child growing away from a parent, even the widening chasm between a god and his or her creation. We live in the spaces of life, and they often lack words.
That’s one reason why I started writing flash fiction, with a particular focus on 100-word stories: to find a better mimetic representation of those small but telling moments that reside separately from any larger narrative trajectory. While longer stories tend to operate around the question of what’s next and interweave threads of connections, flash communicates more through caesuras and crevices. Instead of focusing on the “more” of a story, 100-word stories help me focus on those spectral blank spaces that surround our lives. Writing with such gaps has helped me truly hone Hemingway’s famous iceberg dictum: only show the top 10 percent of your story, and leave the other 90 percent below water to be conjured.
I’m often asked what makes a 100-word story successful? Is it simply a prose poem? While many 100-word stories certainly resemble a prose poem, especially in the way they can focus on a mood, the drift of a moment, I think the best 100-word stories move with the escalation any story has. They have a beginning, middle, and end—a telling pivot, an emotional velocity.
The best flash stories also possess what Barthes, in describing what made a photograph arresting, called the punctum—“the sting, speck, cut, prick.” A good 100-word story startles the reader in similar manner. “This something has triggered me, has provoked a tiny shock, a satori, the passage of a void,” writes Barthes.
Whereas a film presents a world that constantly flows by “in the same constitutive style,” Barthes says, the photograph breaks the “constitutive style”—it lacks protensity, resides in isolation, separate from past and future, and therein lies its power to astonish.
In the end, life is more akin to a collection of snapshots shuffled all about than it is a feature film. We possess so many random, desultory moments, memories of pricks and tickles, and we wonder and wander through the spaces around them. Therein the mystery lies.
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Grant Faulkner is the executive director of National Novel Writing Month and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. His stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, The Southwest Review, PANK, Gargoyle, eclectica, Puerto del Sol, and the Berkeley Fiction Review, among others. He’s currently in the process of finishing a collection of one hundred 100-word stories, Fissures.
Reblogged this on Running Toward Happy and commented:
I have neglected writing because I felt I never had enough “right” words to tell my story. This gives me joy!!
I have neglected writing because I felt I never had enough “right” words to tell my story. This gives me joy!!
Yes! I used to write screenplays for a living. Now I write flash fiction for the love of it.
Reblogged this on The World Turned Upside Down.
I’ve heard people say about jazz that it is the notes that are NOT played that are most important…That never made sense to me. But this post presents a similar idea and it resonated with me instantly. The idea of the gaps between two lovers for instance — there’s the story that is their love affair and their time together, but there are also the times they spend away from each other and in those times, stories occur that are separate (and sometimes secret) from their main story. I also like the idea of life as a scattering of photographs. Yes. I think of life and of stories as the glimpses you get through windows at night when you are driving down a dark neighborhood street — one story after another blinking by as you travel forward, whole lifetimes contained in the walls of all those houses. Thank you for writing this.
Reblogged this on martymcfarland.
Reblogged this on T.dwella and commented:
I found this post to be very informative and it has really motivated me to make an effort toward writing with fewer words and more meaning (if that makes any sense).
[…] 100-Word Stories: Writing with Gaps. […]
Reblogged this on One More Sonnet and commented:
So much of what describes a successful 100-word story is captured in a sonnet; in its earliest Italian form a ‘little song’: http://sonneteer155.com/2015/06/02/dust-and-a-broom/
So much of what describes a successful 100-word story is captured in a sonnet; in its earliest Italian form a ‘little song’: http://sonneteer155.com/2015/06/02/dust-and-a-broom/
I spent a good part of my life sitting in a bus seat traveling from major city to city in quest of work or so I thought. Looking back in my old age I believe it was simply that I never really felt I belonged anywhere.
The jobs I found in these travel paid reasonable well, but still I never planted roots till later on in life I never married but did become a writer after going back to school. I’ve published two poems in a Alberta magazine. I did however develop a good strong imagination riding those bus’s though.
[…] About the concept: 100-Word Stories: Writing with Gaps […]
Reblogged this on NiaSharmaFiction and commented:
Mind the gap.
[…] Read more here. […]
i had twelve pictures laid on the table. and as the time clicked, the pictures were shuffled like cards. and along the first picture, happiness, came three consective pains pruning on, and just behind the picture, Suicide attempt, came, another chance, followed by, life smiling back.