The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story

By Grant Faulkner and Megan Giddings

With increased compression, every word, every sentence matters more. A writer must learn how to form narratives around caesuras and crevices instead of strings of connections, to move a story through the symbolic weight of images, to master the power of suggestion.

With elegant prose, deep readings of other writers, and scaffolded writing exercises, The Art of Brevity takes the reader on a lyrical exploration of compact storytelling, guiding readers to heighten their awareness of not only what appears on the page but also what doesn’t.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780826364746

Grant Faulkner

Grant Faulkner is the executive director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the cofounder of 100 Word Story. His work has been widely anthologized in flash-fiction collections, and he is the author of several books, including All the Comfort Sin Can Provide, Fissures, and Nothing Short of 100: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story.

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Introduction

Going Long. Going Short.

HOW DID A WRITER immersed in a lifelong training regimen to be a novelist find his aesthetic (and find himself) in brevity?

Like many, when I first became a writer, I thought the end goal of writing was that big behemoth of a saga called the Great American Novel, no matter the absurdity of questing after such a holy grail. I thought the best way to understand the endless ribbons of America’s highways, the gritty streets of our cities, and the oozing boundaries of our suburbia, resided in an ever-expansive aesthetic of maximalist comprehensiveness, full of crisscrossing tentacles of story lines and sentences bursting with syntactic curlicues. Our souls sprawl with this land, after all. Think of the labyrinthine universe of David Foster Wallace, the dense weight of William Faulkner’s past (which I share only literarily, not genetically), or Saul Bellow’s overflowing, burbling prose (yes, it must be noted that an aesthetic of bigness, not to mention the notion of the Great American Novel itself, tends to come from men).

I started out writing short stories, as most fiction writers do, but I wrote them as if passing through the minor leagues on my way to the big leagues. As much as I admired the spare minimalism of Raymond Carver or Amy Hempel, short stories were primarily vehicles to learn how to write longer and bigger. They were like novels with training wheels, I suppose. A stage to get through on the way to the real stuff. The big stuff.

More is a key word in learning to write. We level up as writers, writing longer papers and using bigger words and longer sentence constructions at each academic stage because we’re taught that serious, sophisticated thoughts need more of everything to be conveyed. Most of my writing life has been a training ground of more, in fact, so I rarely conceived of writing less. Even when I got my MFA, in many of the creative-writing workshops I took I frequently heard the comment, I want to know more about _____. More characterization, more backstory, more details—more of everything. Rarely did anyone advise places to cut or condense or write less. And I gave similar feedback, as if being tapped on the knee with a doctor’s rubber hammer. None of us stopped to ask if this more added to the story or if it was just a passing curiosity of the reader’s, a need to have the story spelled out instead of imagined. It seemed that the more addressed a flaw, something overlooked, something flimsy and insubstantial. So I wrote longer and longer short stories, and then I wrote longer and longer novels, trying to fill in gaps, not open them.

But then, while working on one of these novels—a novel I’d been working on off-and-on for ten years—a friend of mine, Paul Strohm, wrote a memoir, Sportin’ Jack, consisting of 100 one-hundred-word stories. He modeled the form as if writing with a fixed-lens camera, with the idea that an arbitrary limit inspired compositional creativity. I tried my hand at writing such tiny stories because I like to experiment, and I also needed a break from my behemoth of a novel, which had not only begun to weigh down my creativity but weigh down my life as well.

I learned that the short form is beguiling. Since it’s so short, it would seem to be easier, but in my initial forays I couldn’t come anywhere close to the one-hundred-word mark. At best, I could chisel a story down to 150 words, and I was so frustrated by the gobs of material I’d left out that I didn’t see a way to go farther. I told Paul that I’d written several stories as short as 150 words, and I told him I was pleased with that level of brevity, but instead of approbation, I received disapproval. He chided me to keep going farther, to trust that my story would actually get better as I cut it down. I didn’t quite trust that, but I kept going. The one-hundred-word form had become a riddle to solve.

My failure at concision made me reflect on my writing habits. I began to think of how the chants of more, more, more I’d heard in my writing workshops were often the single least helpful bit of feedback, impinging upon the vaporous whorls of suspense and necessary reserve that are integral to good storytelling, no matter the form. I’d trained myself to write through backstories, layers of details, and thickets of connections, but the more I pared my prose to reach 100 words, a different kind of storytelling presented itself. The art of brevity. The art of excision. The art of compression. The art of omission. The art of spaces and gaps and breaths. The art of less.

Such an art finds itself at the center of flash fiction, which is defined as a story under a thousand words and goes by many names, including short-shorts, miniatures, sudden fiction, hint fiction, postcard fiction, and post-it fiction, among others. Flash communicates via caesuras and crevices. There is no asking more, no premise of comprehensiveness, because flash fiction is a form that privileges excision over agglomeration, adhering more than any other narrative form to Ernest Hemingway’s famous iceberg dictum: only show the top one-eighth of your story and leave the rest below water to be conjured. A one-hundred-word story might only show the top 1 percent of your story.

Flash is a type of border crossing into a different land of storytelling, especially the short-shorts of the world of micro fiction (stories less than four hundred words). For one, flash is a form that naturally holds transience. Julio Ortega says in the flash series he calls Diario imaginario that he prefers to write them with cheap hotel pens because of the feeling of provisional, momentary writing. The writer Leesa Cross-Smith says flash stories "are here and they are gone … we’re talking not much room for backstory, we’re talking drive-thru stories and quickies and pit stops and sneaky, stolen kisses and breathless sprints and gotta go. In his fifty-two-word story Lint, Richard Brautigan ponders the events of his childhood and compares them to lint, pieces of a distant life that have no form or meaning."

Except that by capturing these small, intense moments we’re elevating the lint-like stories of our lives into something much more. The flash form speaks to the singularity of such stray moments by calling attention to the spectral blank spaces around them. Flash allows stories to capture the running water of the everyday. Suddenly, the strain of music heard faintly from the next apartment becomes the reason for a story itself. Brevity allows us to get close to the unsayable, to know something that is beyond words or the wordless moments words bring us to. Brevity is a tool and an experience. It’s a way of being, and, as such, it helps us live. Life tends to become habitual. We are automatic creatures in some ways. The aesthetic of brevity helps return us to direct sensation. It heightens attention, recasting life with vividness. We realize the contradictory significance of things. Or the harmonious significance of things. Or both. It’s a little like falling in love. It’s a little like noticing the first slant of the autumn sun. It’s a little like that moment of waking from a powerful dream and finding yourself in real life.

An aesthetic is our lens upon the world, so our aesthetic holds an existential position. Often the word aesthetic is seen as focused on determining the beauty of an object, and an aesthete is seen as someone who is removed from real life, immersed in art, perhaps even decadently so. I’d love to open up the definition of what aesthetic means and focus less on its subjective or superficial traits and more on how an aesthetic is a framework to express and understand life. The Greek term aisthesis means sensual perception, so an aesthetic is rooted in the feeling of experience. An aesthetic offers an entry point into our relationships with people, objects, events, environments, the past, the present, the future, and even the political structures in which we are all enmeshed. An aesthetic might seem distant from a belief system or a faith, yet an aesthetic forms the foundation for how a story or belief is expressed. An aesthetic is a conversation. Our aesthetic determines how we experience life and how we express it.

For example, Sadia Quraeshi Shepard says that the aesthetic of the fragment shapes the diverse histories, homelands, and literary traditions she finds herself in: In my own writing life, the idea of the fragment and how it might suggest the fractures and dislocations of memories and border-crossings is a recurring fascination.

Life isn’t a round, complete circle—it’s shaped by fragments, shards, and pinpricks. It’s a collage of snapshots, a collection of the unspoken, an attic full of situations you can’t quite get rid of. The brevity of flash is perfect for capturing the small but telling moments when life pivots almost unnoticeably, yet profoundly. For me, the fragments of tiny stories perfectly capture the disconnections that I am fascinated by in life, whether it’s the gulf between a loved one, the natural world, or God. I don’t want a form that represents comprehensiveness or unity because that’s an aesthetic at odds with my experience of life.

If a reader desires full dramatization of every dramatizable moment, he or she should read a novel, which is about expansion; flash fiction is about ambiguity, said Nathan Leslie.

Ambiguity is an unheralded gift of brevity. Society, of course, likes definite, tangible answers—scientific proofs, algorithms that dissect data, sensors that guide self-driving cars—but so much of life resides in ambiguity. Do I love her? Do they love me? Why did she say this? What did he mean by that? We live in the ephemera of riddles.

Such moments invite a different sort of treatment. As I honed my sensibility of brevity by paring my stories down to one hundred words, I learned that each line of a miniature story must carry a symbolic weight that moves the story forward. Yet, at the same time, the gaps within and around the story speak as largely as the text itself. The words of the last line should create a silence, a white space in which the reader breathes. The story enters that breath, and continues, writes Jayne Anne Phillips. Because short-shorts speak to what’s left out, because they often border on prose poetry, the reader needs to pause, reflect, and fill in the gaps—to be a cocreator, essentially, in contrast to being swept along in the gushes and rushes of the stream of words that formed my earlier maximalist approach.

In fact, the short form requires a deeper humility from the writer. You’re writing not to draw attention to yourself, as some works do with verbal flourishes or stylistic panache, but to serve the story in all of its nuances, searching for exactly the right word to work in such a tiny space. A short-short exists on a different plane.

Some think such fragmentary brevity makes this Twitter and Facebook era perfect for flash fiction because its shortness fits snugly into the flitting attention spans of Internet readers, and there’s a truth in that, but a well-crafted short-short demands not to be read quickly but to be read multiple times, with the attention one brings to a poem. Flash stories aren’t meant to serve short attention spans just like haikus weren’t meant to serve short attention spans. Quite the opposite. You can say that flash prolongs perception and causes you to pause. Flash actually cuts through distraction and holds the possibility of returning the reader—and yourself as writer—to a more focused and intense reading experience.

There are still some stodgy critics who say flash fiction is a passing fad of our digitally obsessed times, and until recently it has struggled to be taken seriously by academia and by what I’ll call the establishment literary world (and it’s still not revered by critics with the same gravitas as the novel or embraced by the bigger publishers as being commercially viable). I’ve always wondered if somehow the word flash minimizes the seriousness of the form because flash’s connotations range from flash sales to flash mobs or even just the word flashy. Hardly literary. Flash is in a paradoxical position: it’s both marginalized and popular. It’s like Cinderella, banned from going to the ball, yet at the ball (and waiting for its glass slipper). But times are changing, and the form has begun to establish itself, being taught more widely in classrooms and becoming the subject of an increasing number of anthologies.

An aesthetic of brevity is emerging in novels as well, with the recent publication of novels that are formed around snippets, snapshots, and linked shorts, like Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation or Justin Torres’s We the Animals. It’s interesting, though, how an aesthetic of bigness still rules. In response to the rise of these novels, which some call the novel in flash, literary doyenne Joyce Carol Oates tweeted strange to have come of age reading great novels of ambition, substance, & imagination (Dostoyevsky, Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner) & now find yourself praised & acclaimed for wan little husks of ‘auto fiction’ with space between paragraphs to make the book seem longer …

My question is whether the novel in flash isn’t just as ambitious as any long novel and whether the space between paragraphs isn’t meant to make the book seem longer but to function artfully as space does in a Helen Frankenthaler painting, or silence in a John Cage composition, or the play of positive and negative space in Anish Kapoor’s sculpture (and let’s remember what Miles Davis said about jazz: It’s not the notes you play; it’s the notes you don’t play.). So … wan little husks? I beg to differ.

In fact, an aesthetic of brevity isn’t just for works of brevity. When I write long, I’m also writing short, not writing for maximalist comprehensiveness but focusing on what words can be carved from sentences and how paragraphs and chapters can move with hints rather than divulgences. I conceive of creating spaces around the chapters of my novel instead of cramming those spaces with skeins of connecting text. I feel a deep, even ecstatic pleasure when I shave entire pages away from a draft, as if I’ve cleaned out a messy closet. I think often of Roland Barthes’s question in Pleasure of the Text: Is not the most erotic portion of the body where the garment gapes? It’s an apt metaphor for flash fiction because these tiny stories flow from tantalizing glimpses that lure the reader forward.

One might posit that short-shorts are the most natural storytelling form—that if a goal of literature is to reach the greatest degree of mimesis, then the flash form delivers verisimilitude in a way longer forms don’t. Most stories we tell in real life are under 500 words, said Rebecca Makkai. You’re at a party, everyone has a glass of wine, and suddenly you have the floor. You throw out your little story like a grenade.

Raymond Carver, a notable minimalist of the short-story form, tried unsuccessfully to write novels early in his career. But not every writer is wired for the length of a novel just as not every writer is wired to write miniatures. Carver said he lacked the attention span, the patience to write a novel. I suppose you could call this a weakness, but he decided it was a strength. Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications, he said, and his specifications followed the principles of brevity. By focusing on shorter stories and poems, he was able to nurture something that he said every writer needs beyond talent: a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking.

If Carver had pursued the Great American Novel, then he might not have been attuned to his special way of seeing, and he would have certainly been in the wrong context for its expression. Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on, he said.

The lesson: if you write small, don’t worry about writing big.

Now I rarely think of what I call the more when I revise a story or when I give feedback on an early draft of another’s work, but instead I focus on the less. Ghosts are good for writing, I’ve learned, so I’ve invited them in. Our lives are as much about the unspoken as the spoken. We live in the gaps, the white spaces.

In some ways, this book lives in the gaps as well. This isn’t a craft book so much as it is a meditation on the