The Incredible Superpower of Flash

By Dinty W. Moore

Brevity magazine turned 25 this year, and understandably, I’ve been asked countless times to define “What makes a flash a flash?” or to reveal “How do you fit a full story in 750 words?”

My answers have varied over the years, but they’ve always included two essential concepts: compression and layering.

Here is how they work:

COMPRESSION

Poets know this well. Saying more with less. In flash prose, the challenge is twofold: eliminating unnecessary words and phrases, and choosing words that provide a vivid, powerful experience for the reader.

For instance:

The Long Version

My mother walked quickly into the room and she sure seemed angry about something. She didn’t normally enter my bedroom when the door was closed. It was morning, and I figured it had to do with my sneaking in so late the night before and her wanting to know where I had been. She stood real close to me with a furious look on her face and made her suspicions of me entirely clear. She was holding a towel from the kitchen.

The Compressed Version

Mom charged in, ignoring the closed bedroom door, stood so close I could feel the heat coming off her body, could smell her morning coffee. “Where on God’s earth were you last night?” she demanded, twisting a dish towel in her reddened hands.

LAYERING

Let’s look again at the examples above.

In the second, briefer version, readers are provided

(1) physical action (charging),

(2) context/setting (the closed bedroom door, morning coffee),

(3) sensory detail (“I could feel the heat”),

(4) characterization through dialogue (“Where on God’s earth…”),

(5) characterization through action (“twisting a dish towel”),

(6) potentially significant detail (her reddened hands.)

All of these are layered into two sentences. While in the first version—the longer one—some of the sentences do ‘single’ or maybe ‘double duty,’ offering one or two layers of information, in flash prose a sentence needs to do ‘triple’ or ’quadruple duty,’ layering in as much information as possible, with quick, direct indicators.

It is how we, as human beings, perceive real life—multiple cues firing quickly, and being read simultaneously. As writers, we want to replicate that real life experience for the reader. Put the reader in the moment; don’t just casually look back, slowing down the action.

THE INCREDIBLE SUPERPOWER OF FLASH

So there’s my short definitions, but here’s the thing. As I began to identify this layering effect in the best flash pieces submitted to Brevity magazine, I also noticed how writers I admire the most use this compression and layering in longer essays, and, in fact, in book length nonfiction. Think James Baldwin, Mary Karr. This “flash technique” is not exclusive to compressed prose, it is a skill that will make all your writing more powerful, or as the kids like to say, “super impactful.”

I continue to love flash nonfiction as a form, as a pleasure to read and a challenge to write, but what I’ve become increasingly convinced of is that the discipline of compression and layering is a superpower certain writers acquire, either through a radioactive spider bite or through hard work and practice, and it makes all the difference.

[By the way, the superpower of The Flash, the comic book hero pictured above, is the ability to “move, think, and react at light speeds” alongside superhuman endurance. Wouldn’t all of us as writers love that?]

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Dinty W. Moore is founding editor of Brevity and the Brevity Blog, and author of numerous memoirs and craft books.