Writing with the power of suggestion

When I wrote my book The Art of Brevity, I thought a lot about how stories flow from tantalizing glimpses that lure the reader forward. A good story moves through the power of suggestion; it lives in the bliss of its mystery.

This applies to real life as well, of course—we project a story upon a moment, a mood, a gesture. We don’t know if our story is accurate. But it is our story, and we look for the next hint to carry us forward.

Aesthetics are always rooted in existential matters, I always say.

For this week’s post, I thought I’d collect some snippets from my book about how writing flash fiction taught me to write with the power of suggestion—how each of these elements is its own craft tool. This is where I find the poetry of the form.

A story resides in what isn’t told

“A short-short story communicates via caesuras and crevices, and what is omitted can speak as much as the text itself. I think of my stories moving like a flashlight’s beam, as if the reader is following a series of luminous dots on a path through the night. By writing in the tightly compressed space of flash fiction, I learned how to create spirals of suspense to make the story bigger, much like a poem.”

Every word is a musical note

“The music of language is a concentrating force that creates intimacy with the rhythms of a writer’s imagination, its cadences communicating hints of irony or sincerity, humor or distress. The sounds give shape to the story. As you read, you feel the story’s weights and measures, taste its consonants, absorb the essence of it in ways you might not even be able to name.”

Ambiguity as craft tool

“Ambiguity is an unheralded gift of brevity. Brevity finds its breath in questions. It’s not a style that seeks to speak with certainty, but with nuance, much like poetry. Brevity naturally provides an opening to mystery because the mysterious eludes all explanation. It speaks to something more significant than what can be explained. The deepest truths are ineffable.”

The reader is co-author of the story

“Writers trust the solidity of their words, the cohesiveness of the world they create. But readers read through connotation as much as they do through denotation, taking the words elsewhere, weaving memories and emotions and intuitions into the ink of the words on the page. The shorter the piece, the sparer the details, the more the reader is required to fill the space, so the writer has to trust in the conjurings of the reader’s mind.”

Because a story is like a Ouija board

“Telling a good short-short story is similar to playing the Ouija board. You discover a small part of the story and let your imagination speak with the other side, invisible as it might be, to know the rest of it.”

Illumination through image

When writing flash, I often think of Lu Chi’s advice on capturing detail in his classic The Art of Writing:

When the vein of jade

Is revealed in the rock

The whole mountain glistens

A single image can carry a story just as it carries a poem. The detail of the jade works to illuminate the entire mountain. Flash fiction, much like poetry, is an imagist’s medium. A striking image connects us with the unconscious, offers a path to the dreamworld. Shapes shift, and otherworldly possibilities arise. In such displacement, there is a peculiar kind of placement. The image is carrying us.

A story in suspension

“As the writer Jayne Anne Phillips said, ‘The realized one-page fiction must move palpably beyond the page, like a ghost self … The one-page fiction should hang in the air of the mind like an image made of smoke.’

Your story, in other words, shouldn’t be tethered to the words on the page, but in the suggestion that lives in the air around a reader.”

Because I’m teaching an online course (10% discount!)

My course on novel writing just launched with Domestika!

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Because, hey, The Art of Brevity

If you’re in Petaluma this Thursday

Join me this Thursday, August 3, at 7:00 p.m. at Petaluma's Copperfield's. I'll be in conversation with the fabulous Jane Ciabattari.