Woman As Art
Have you ever read a piece of prose in which nothing seemed to happen?
I first discovered the writer John O’Hara when I was a young writer, and I was convinced that many of his stories that appeared in The New Yorker from the 1920s to the 1960s were not short stories at all. I was sure they were sketches, vignettes; because nothing seemed to happen in the stories.
Hi, everyone! This is the Old Soldier.
John O’Hara (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I would go to the public library, get these big hard covered books that contained a year or so of back issues of The New Yorker and I would sit for hours and skim through the table of contents of each issue. When I found a story by John O’Hara I would read it looking for narrative movement. Because I knew that if the piece had narrative movement it was really a short story.
Well, John O’Hara was a master of the short story. And sometimes the narrative movement in his stories was so slight that at first reading I couldn’t always find it; but it was always there.
Something always did happen. Often what happened was subtle. You had to pay attention; but narrative movement was there and within the context of the story it was significant.
The New Yorker (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
So, how much narrative movement should your flash fiction have?
It doesn’t need much. But it does have to be there. And it has to be significant.
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10 Things You Can Do With Dialogue
Image via Wikipedia
The Old Soldier loves writing dialogue. That’s why I love reading the work of Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, John O’Hara and F. Scott Fitzgerald. They used dialogue so well and they used plenty of it. Here’s a list of what you can do with dialogue.
Keep reading and keep writing that flash fiction.
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Filed under: Commentaries | Tagged: create, dialogue, donation, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O'Hara, Raymond Carver, realism, theme, Writing Flash Fiction | 5 Comments »