Week 6, Short Fiction

Short fiction--specifically flash fiction--is an ambiguous but cool form, because a lot of the time it's difficult to distinguish it (and its strengths) from poetry or (worse) prose poetry, though usually with a more prominent focus on narrative. Like fiction, they're easier to interpret from line to line but at the same time, much more complex, because you have the introduction of more prominent increasingly broad characters, themes, and narrative arcs, and "action" takes on an entirely different significance.

I really liked all of the shorts we've read so far. I'm always mentioning that I wish college classes would focus more on actual contemporary writing, so it's really nice to use the Indiana review rather than the traditional anthology beginning with Homer and ending with Ginsberg. A lot of them took advantage of this quality I was discussing--the capacity of blending the strength of prose and poetry, while blurring the lines between them.

I've written some flash fiction in the past, though nothing particularly good. They set up a lot of possibilities, such as a long sequence of related flash fiction, a novel in flash fiction, etc. Also, I really liked that we read Borges in class—I actually owned the collection we ended up reading (Andrew Hurley’s version of the Collected Fiction), so before doing the writing today, I ended up rereading some from Borges flash fiction for inspiration, as that kind of writing came much more naturally to him than it does to me.