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I sat at my picture window yesterday, watching the first snowstorm of the winter season. It was very windy, and the clouds were performing somersaults across the sky. At times, the snow fell as little pellets; at other times, it fell in large, fluffy flakes.
When sunset approached, there was a brief glimpse of the sun as it dropped below the horizon. Both the clouds and the falling snow were touched by color — now orange, now pink — and I recalled hearing that the native Alaskans had a hundred words for different kinds of snow. I may have misremembered the exact number of names for snow, but I the concept left a deep impression on me. Theirs must be an extremely precise language.
As one of her last duties as guest editor for the Winter issue, Maggie Mountford offered a favorite book as an addition to our list of editor recommendations. In summarizing the book, she made an off-hand comment that poetry and flash fiction were very closely related.
The thought had not previously occurred to me, but instantly I understood that Maggie was right. One of the most obvious similarities between poetry and flash is that both are compressed forms of literature. Poetry has a number of techniques that help provide fullness of meaning, such as metaphor, synesthesia, and many others. Fiction has fewer, but there is one that is common to both good poems and good flash — precision in word choice.
Make friends with your thesaurus. Instead of adding an adjective to a noun that's not quite right, try finding a better noun. When tempted to embellish your verb with an adverb, think before you type. Is there an alternate verb that incorporates the essence of what you intended the adverb to convey?
In the end, it becomes a balancing act between finding precisely the right word and making sure that your readers will understand what you have written.
There will likely be times when you will still need to describe that snowflake as fluffy. After all, not everyone understands native Alaskan.
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