You may not realize this, but one aspect of being a publisher is to take care of all the little jobs that no one else signs up for. For flashquake's publisher — me — those tasks include processing all incoming submissions, recording them in our database, blinding them, sending them off to the editors for review, and recording editor reviews in the database. Another of my jobs is to send out the acceptance and rejection notices at the end of each reading period. As you know, we return editors' comments along with submission notifications, and because I'm responsible for all of these processes, I can't help but notice what's said.
If you review our listings in any of the market resources where flashquake is included, you'll note that we insist on a complete story, with compelling characters and a beginning, middle, and end. Implicit in that requirement is the concept of narrative drive — something that carries the reader through the story, affects the characters, and manipulates the situation in such a way that the characters are transformed in some way at the end. That transformation may be tangible, philosophical, emotional, or any of a number of other potentialities. But the core concept is a narrative...a story is told and things change as a result.
Earlier this month, I sat down to process rejection notices, and this time, I noted a larger-than-usual number of comments indicating that the submission had not been a complete story, that the narrative thread was jumbled, or that the narrative lacked sufficient context to engage the reader.
After the first couple of hours, I decided to take a break and get a cup of coffee from the kitchen. When I returned, I'd received a new e-mail from a listserv I subscribe to called "The Daily Dharma," one suggested to me by a now-deceased colleague. The subject of the e-mail attracted my attention immediately: Lose the Narrative. Was this synchronicity at work?
The text of the post was a quotation from Pema Chodron's Comfortable with Uncertainty:
"In sitting meditation, our practice is to watch our thoughts arise, label them "thinking," and return to the breath. If we were trying to find the beginning, middle, and end of each thought, we'd soon discover that there is no such thing. Trying to find the moment when one thought becomes another is like trying to find the moment when boiling water turns into steam. Yet we habitually string our thoughts together into a story that tricks us into believing that our identity, our happiness, our pain, and our problems are all solid and separate entities. In fact, like thoughts, all these constructs are constantly changing. Each situation, each thought, each word, each feeling, is just a passing memory."
So if Ms. Chodron is right, are we being unrealistic to require a cogent narrative thread throughout the work we select for publication? I admit that I had to think about it a while. But instead, what I took from her words supported our conception of flash. While you can write a complete novel comprised of flash stories, a perfect flash story is like an individual thought — complete. Instead of trying to thread these thoughts together, we select one, polish it until is shines, smooth the edges until their connection to anything else cannot be discerned. We offer it up to provide an insight, a moment of connection, a glimpse of clarity or understanding.
Literature is not meditation, but we can use some of Ms. Chodron's wisdom to inform our work. Lose the narrative? No, but carefully select what you want to say and select the perfect details, a recognizable context, a compelling situation, and a character we can relate to when you tell your tale.