"Remaking the Moon" by David Gaffney

The texts in David Gaffney's "The Half-Life of Songs" (Salt, 2010) though short, are clearly stories rather than belonging to a microgenre like anecdote or vignette - they have plots, locations, characters and usually a resolution. My favourite (and according to an interview in Flash Magazine, one of Gaffney's too) is "Remaking the Moon". Straight away with the initial words "Mason's house" we meet the story's only named character, and learn that it's his house rather than a home. Why is the protagonist's name Mason? Masons are makers of walls, but they're also a secretive society, and as we'll see, he's a loner. The house had "no borders of any kind ... so the local historians ... stared through his window at him". He decided to give the local historians something to stare at, playing to the audience. After years of this, someone knocked. Actually, it's a neighbour. Young. Female. Shy - 'No one has paused at my window for a long, long, time' she said. At his suggestion they assembled a jigsaw puzzle of the moon, making one of the onlooking historians happy - 'something had been added to him'. And there the story ends.

When there are fewer than 500 words to play with, inexperienced writers sometimes confuse writing Flash with playing the radio gameshow "Just a Minute", avoiding deviation, repetition or hesitation. In this piece though, the language isn't compressed - "eye" appears 4 times, and there are 6 uses of verbs to do with looking. Nevertheless every detail counts, often counting double, not only being interesting in itself, but also having structural and symbolic duties. Some provide humour - the scenes that Mason presents include lute playing, wrestling with a dummy and finally badger-stuffing. Other details are teasingly symbolic - the oglers "saunter off, trailing their fingers along his brickwork". Standard symbolism is exploited too - House (body), Window (eye, access), Moon (love, sadness), Jigsaw (solving) - but each is repurposed - the house isn't a home, the window is more for people to look in, the moon's a jigsaw, and all the jigsaw's pieces are the same.

Even the title's ready to mean more. It could be treated as a crossword clue - if you remake "the moon" you get "not home". But this isn't a simple puzzle story where readers tick off answers one by one. Why do all the jigsaw pieces look the same? Because then the jigsaw's easy to do? To emphasise that it's just a device they both exploit so that they can stay in each other's company? The historians "streamed" past on the way to sluice gates and flooded mines. Why all the water imagery? To illustrate two ways to deal with emotion - engineered control of the torrential versus subconscious stillness? I don't know. Part of the fun of the story is that there are aspects that don't quite fit, offering readers wiggle room. There's often a partial rationale - the taxidermist's plastic eyes littering the floor at the end contrast with all the earlier staring - but why do the couple make the jigsaw on the floor, kneeling amongst the sawdust and false eyes, rather than on a table?

I've not dealt with what to many readers is its the emotional armature. Gaffney says in the interview that this story's "about lonely people coming together and not really knowing what to do together, so they do a jigsaw". In a Guardian article he suggested that Flash writers should "place the denouement in the middle of the story", which is rather what happens here when the jigsaw comes out of the cupboard, but like the terrorist's 2nd bomb that goes off where crowds are fleeing from the 1st, there's another ending. In the same article he suggested that a Flash story's last line "should leave the reader with something which will continue to sound after the story has finished. It should not complete the story". Why did the final scene make that historian happy? Maybe most of the local historians thought that the jigsaw's just another piece of performance art put on for their entertainment. What did that one special historian lack? Something opposite to his role perhaps - something universal, forward-looking. The moon provides the universality, and the happiness of the couple bodes well for the future. Furthermore we're told the historian's "round-faced", a detail that can't be accidental. Perhaps he sees in the reconstructed moon his face reflected, entire.

Short though it is, the story doesn't seem lacking in any respect. It's defined by what's left out almost as much as by its contents. Nor have I by any means exhausted the piece. There's something for readers of various persuasions. And there are 54 other stories in the book.

Adapting short texts for the market

When texts are short, the poetry and prose categories can merge. So why bother trying to categorize? Once people other than the author are involved, there are several reasons - e.g.

• Editors of anthologies and specialist magazines need to draw a line somewhere
• Writers submitting to certain magazines need to specify whether their submission is poetry or prose. What type of work does the author want the submission to be printed amongst? Magazines often demarcate, though Arts Council "New Writing" anthologies sometimes had a "Texts" section for unclassified works, and "The New Yorker" used to have "Casuals" and "Shouts and Murmers".
• Readers may benefit from knowing which reading strategies to initially adopt, and which expectations to develop.

Categories

The classifications are more fine-grained than just "Prose" and "Poetry". There are Haibun (combining prose and haiku), anecdotes, vignettes, contes, short-shorts, microfiction, Flash, ketai fiction, Twitter lit, prose poems, found poems, etc. The existence of line-breaks usually suffices as a marker of poetry, though some free verse, shorn of its line-breaks, might easily fit into these prose categories. Some forms are defined by word-count. For some others, definitions abound. Here are a few -

• Flash - The Bridport Prize's web site suggests that Flash "contains the classic story elements: protagonist, conflict, obstacles or complications and resolution. However unlike the case with a traditional short story, the word length often forces some of these elements to remain unwritten: hinted at or implied in the written storyline". They impose a 250-word limit.
• Prose poetry - In "This Line Is Not For Turning", a prose poetry anthology she edited, Jane Monson provides a description of the prose-poem "at its most disciplined" - "no more than a page, preferably half of one, focussed, dense, justified, with an intuitive grasp of a good story and narrative, a keen eye for unusual and surprising detail and images relative to that story, and a sharp ear for delivering elegant, witty, clear and subtly surreal pieces of conversation and brief occurrences, incidents or happenings". She goes on to write that her anthology "focuses and captures a particular style; which shares in tone, pithiness and brevity the best traits of 'flash fiction', 'micro fiction', 'sudden prose', and the 'short short story' rather than the strengths and weaknesses of 'free verse', 'blank verse' and 'poetic prose'"
• Prose poetry - In Summer 2012's "Poetry Review", Carrie Etter wrote "While some poets and critics insist that we must resist defining prose poetry for it to retain its subversive genre-blurring character, I find some basic distinctions crucial for its appreciation ... a prose poem develops without 'going' anywhere"

Magazines like Sudden Prose ("Prose Poetry and Short-Short Stories) and Double Room (seeks to "explore the intersection of poetry and fiction") seem to accept the overlap. The 2 denominations occupy similar terrains though they have different histories and look in different directions. Calling a piece a prose poem is still making a statement -

• "Prose Poetry is some of the funniest—and strangest—writing you’ll find anywhere. It lends itself to the comic, and the absurd. Maybe humor is easier to convey in a sentence than in a line break. … Flash Fiction is something else, as it’s about character (and change), and it’s therefore more difficult to pull off in such a short space" - Brett at Bark.
• "Flash fiction focuses on story (whether that be character or plot or place or time). Prose poetry focuses on image and/or emotion" - Chris (Bellingham Review)
• "In spite of the prose poem’s history of breaking rules and redefining itself ..." - Bruce Holland Rogers (flash fiction online).

Market trends

I think the current short-text literary arena is currently dominated by 3 overlapping terms

• Poetry - the dominant term; so much so that in the late 1900s a short text had to be made into a poem to have much of a chance of publication. In the age of relaxed free verse, inserting regular line-breaks often sufficed to create a "poem". A text labelled as such carries some of the weight traditionally associated with the term, and is most likely to be read beside other poetry. It needn't have plot or character, nor need it be written in sentences, though it frequently has all of these properties.
• Flash Fiction - a fairly recent and popular term for a cluster of genres that have been around for a long time. Derived from the short story, it's expected to have plot and character (though the proportions may vary), and is likely to be read beside other (perhaps much longer) fiction. Venues now exist for such work - in dedicated magazines, but also magazines in general are more likely to accept short texts nowadays. Specialist outlets impose word-count limits (from 250 to 1000 words).
• Prose poetry - Initially a rebellion against the rhyme/meter of Formalism, then later a challenge to the one remaining obvious feature of poetry - the line-break. Shorn of its rebel image, it retains its feel of being different - though examples appear in many collections and magazines, there are rarely more than 2 or 3 examples per publication. It's likely to appear beside other poetry. Sometimes the only prose-like feature it possesses is the layout, but more often it's in sentences, and can (or even should, according to some practitioners) have narrative impetus.

The popularity and increasing acceptance of Flash (and to a lesser extent of prose poetry) should mean that fewer texts have gratuitous line-breaks nowadays, but understandably, progress is slow. Re-classification of texts previously published as poetry would help change the climate. When creating his poetry anthology, Yeats used a fragment of Pater's prose. Even pieces as long as Carolyn Forché's "The Colonel" have appeared in both poetry and Flash anthologies. In Monson's prose poetry anthology, someone contributed part of their novel. I think the distinctions between micro-fiction and prose-poetry are rather in the eye of the beholder, and the prose-poetry/free-verse distinction can be merely the result of typing habits or previous adaptions for markets.

Adaptions

Given these fuzzy theoretic definitions and the fluidity of the market, it's tempting for writers to add/remove line-breaks, add/remove punchlines, or add/remove connections in order to make a text more appealing to particular outlets. For some styles (those using surrealism, perhaps) I don't think any artistic integrity is lost by doing this. Given the variation in word-count limits it's also worth having more than one version of stories. When texts are adapted, more genre decision might be necessary. When line-breaks are removed from poetry, one of two effects are likely -

• More narrative might be added (i.e. more prose features added)
• The text might appear rather flat, so to compensate the content may become more surreal/imagistic, less linear (i.e. more poetry features added).

When shortening prose, several things can happen. The result might be

• A sketch - same proportions as a story
• A slice (just the sounds, maybe, or a moment in time without back-story)
• A fable (a genre that allows omissions)
• Selected extracts - an interesting set-up followed quickly by a punchline rather than by character development.
• A prose form - a shopping list, an application form, a questionnaire, etc.
• More obscurity (on the grounds that readers can re-read)
• More intensity or extremes

I think that a piece in a form is often printed in poetry sections of magazines even if its content isn't poetic - "forms" and "short texts" both tend to be associated with poetry. So shortened prose can end up in a poetry venue.

Series

The distinction between short and long texts is challenged by series. In Time Lines: few lines and fewer George Szirtes looks at Twitter, pointing out that Jennifer Egan's novella, Black Box is told all in tweets. Similarly, microfictions can be strung into a sequence.

See also

• Short Fiction
• Managing story length
• Flash
• Poetry or prose?
• Prose poems
• a list of Flash outlets

Flash

People not uncommonly say that short stories are more like poetry than novels. Some short, single-focus stories may well be mistaken for poetry, just as some poetry gets called "chopped-up prose". In the journey from story to poem there used to be a no-man's land of unpublishable short prose. The only hope of publication for these pieces was in poetry magazines. Texts in the format of recipes or shopping lists became poems. Anecdotes and vignettes couldn't be prose-lineated in poetry magazines because they weren't "Prose Poems" - a term that had rather been taken over by surrealists and erstwhile experimentalists (Baudelaire, Russel Edson etc.) So they got a line-breaks make-over.

Now the literary landscape's changed - we have Flash. Flash isn't a genre or a mode. Definitions vary, but in practise it's short (less than 1000 words, sometimes a lot less) and doesn't use poetic line-breaks (though it may still use line-breaks the way that adverts, lists, etc use them). Usually it employs narrative, character or plot, but sometimes it uses juxtaposition. The style may be poetic without it needing to be a poem, though the more it jettisons traditional story features (character, plot, length) and adopts poetic ones (sound effects, form) the more like a poem it will be.

I think Flash writers reading some poetry magazines for the first time might see familiar material but might wonder about all the line-breaks - "It's Flash with hiccups". Some free verse writers don't like adjusting let alone removing line-breaks though they have trouble explaining what they are for - "they just feel right" ... "they just came out that way" ... "they give the imagery room to breathe", etc. The poets might indeed be able to point to a line-break that introduces a telling pause, neglecting to explain what the pauses presumably introduced by all the other line-breaks are for. The "free" in the phrase "free verse" means to me that the author's freed of the need to put line-breaks in just for the sake of a restrictive form, but that freedom has become a duty, with many poems adopting the regular rectangular stanzas of older formal poetry.

I don't think there's such a thing as a neutral line-break. They're never hidden characters. To me each line-break added is an effect that is potentially powerful but can as easily backfire. And yet, reading poetry one might believe that line-breaks don't have to pass stringent tests to justify their existence the way that adverbs do. Irrelevant ones are politely ignored, like someone's speech impediment. Take Catherine Smith's "Snakebite" (in the Forward book of poetry 2009). It's 13 3-line stanzas ending with "Tomorrow/ we'll feel sick as dogs. But tonight,/ here, under a bright, full moon,// we're amazing, and as we hug/ on my doorstep, I taste you,/ kiss the snakebite off your lips". If you gave a point for each line-break that did something and deducted a point for line-breaks that did nothing (or less than nothing), I don't think you'd come out with a positive score. It's not an auto-cue text, it's literature, so why not let the story speak for itself? "If in doubt, leave it out" is a maxim that can be applied to more than words. Flash takes the radical approach of eliminating the poetical line-break.

I think many poems written in the past few decades in retrospect fall more appropriately in the Flash category - poems like Carolyn Forche's The Colonel for example. Simon Armitage's poems in the Winter 2009 issue of "The Rialto" (a poetry magazine) looked very Flashy to me. Some magazines ("Tears in the Fence", for example) avoid genre classification by not labelling sections "Prose" and "Poetry". Sometimes (as in a few New Writing anthologies by the British Council) there's a section entitled "Texts" for debatable works.

The 2 Flash writers I've followed most closely (it's hard to avoid them if you read online) are Vanessa Gebbie and Tania Hershman. They both write poetry and short stories as well as Flash. Their Flash spans a spectrum. Pieces like Tania Hershman's "Hand" is where poetry takes over from Flash. The shortest piece in her The White Road and Other Stories book (Orange Prize Commended) is 102 words long. She's got Flash into the august "London Magazine", and in June 2010 BBC Radio 4 will present a week of her Flash. Vanessa Gebbie's contributed to "Field Guide to Flash Fiction" (Rose Metal Press), and has edited SHORT CIRCUIT - A Guide to the Art of the Short Story. Her Flash tends to be closer to prose, I think, which may be because she's more serious about her poetry (her work's been short-listed in the Bridport poetry competition).

Both are relatively new writers emerging without historical baggage into a world where Flash is a viable option and poetry isn't necessarily considered a higher form of art. It will be interesting to see how this new generation of writers redefines the genres.

See also

• A crash course in flash fiction by Laura I. Miller
• Michelle Elvy
• Allan Drew

Short Fiction

In this age of short attention spans when anything that doesn't fit onto a single screen is considered tediously protracted, "Flash Fiction" might bring readers back to short prose. But there are many types of short prose, some of which may merit greater attention. Here I'll try to disentangle a few of the types.

Categorisation

For a while the only category for short prose was "Prose Poem". The Prose Poem has been tried by many French poets. For the most part the pieces are (as Baudelaire described them) "poetic prose, without rhythm and without rhyme. ..". They are sometimes descriptive or anecdotal snapshots of a situation or event. More recently the form has been used in the US. When the genre was out of fashion authors who wanted their short texts published either had to make them fit the expectations of the poetic "prose poem" or, more often, add line-breaks and call their work a poem. Now that the term "Flash" has taken hold, I hope it won't similarly restrict authors. According to Holly Howitt-Dring (‘Making micro meanings: reading and writing microfiction’, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 1:) "The term ‘flash fiction’ was coined in 1988 by Tom Hazuka, Denise Thomas and James Thomas, who began work together in the late 1980s on the anthology Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (Thomas, Thomas and Hazuka 1992). The editors claim that the term ‘flash fiction’ was devised between them, having taught flash fiction in creative writing classes in the years preceding this publication".

Flash shares borders with several other recent categories - "ketai fiction" (to fit in a text message), Twitter Lit (to fit Twitter’s 140 character feed), etc. The definition of Flash is flexible, but at least some outlets want narrative and character to be elements. As David Lehman has pointed out, freed of having to use a verse form, short texts can adopt prose forms (memo, recipe, advert, list, dialogue, etc). Kafka, Borges, and Italo Calvino wrote short prose pieces which weren't prose-poems and sometimes weren't stories either. And what about pieces that use radical juxtaposing? Perhaps we need a more general term.

I've had short pieces published in Southfields (now defunct) and Acumen which were genre-bending, rather like extracts from Roberto Calasso's "The Marriage of cadmus and Harmony". They weren't put into a category, but some publications want to categorize. The New Yorker had a "Casuals" category more recently entitled "Shouts and Murmers" for shorter pieces. One of the UK's "New Writing" anthologies had a "Texts" section which had more like the pieces I had in mind.

Does it matter how we categorise prose? Yes, sometimes, especially if we're wondering where to send one of our pieces. And if we're producing a poetry magazine or "Flash Fiction" anthology, presumably we need to draw the line somewhere.

Let's consider just a few of the factors that help define borders between these genres

• Length - once a piece reaches 1000 words one begins to wonder whether the piece is a short story rather than flash fiction. I think that the features which distinguish prose from poetry tend to require at least 200 words.
• Plot - lack of a narrative (with a beginning and an end) pushes a piece towards the 'prose-poem' and 'extract' genres.
• Characters and Location - if these are absent, the piece is less likely to be placed in a fiction genre.
• Artiness - the more purple the language (the more rhyme, alliteration, imagery and dislocation it has) the more likely the piece might be considered just "a poem without line-breaks".
• Humour - this can provide shape (plot and a punch-line) to a short piece, but not all jokes are "Flash Fiction".
• Layout - Text with line breaks is likely to be called poetry, though adverts, gravestones, and title-pages use line breaks too
.

The term "Flash Fiction" is usually reserved for pieces (not essays) that tell a complete story (usually with some idea of location and characters) in less than 1000 words without being too arty.

Form

One feature not mentioned above is form. Some poetic forms can easily be applied to prose, though ideas can come from elsewhere too. The OuLiPo (Ouvrier de Littérature Potentielle) group of French authors often borrow formal patterns from such other domains as mathematics, logic or chess. Perec and Raymond Queneau experimented with many such forms. Amongst the linguistic ideas are

• Palindromes - Perec wrote a 5000 word palindrome "ca ne va pas san dire"
• Lipograms - Perec's lipogrammatic novel "La Disparition" lacked the letter 'E'.
• Initial letters - Walter Abish's "Alphabetical Africa" consists of 52 chapters, each word in the first chapter beginning with 'A', each in the second chapter with either 'A' or 'B' and so on, until with chapter 26, where all letters are allowed, the process reverses, each word in the final chapter again beginning with 'A'.
• Acrostics - London's Daily Express (Saturday, 6th January, 2001) had a leading article about organic farming. Taking the first letter of each sentence produced "F*** off Desmond" (presumably a message to the paper's new owner, Richard Desmond). The Russian Doll format is an extension of acrostics. Howard Bergerson dubbed self-replicating acrostic text an automynorcagram.

Less lexical is the ploy used in Brooke-Rose's "Between" which avoids all forms of the verb "to be". Syllable counts can also be used. Text can be rule-driven, using a method to generate texts from other texts.

These options may sound rather artificial, though some of them are common enough in poetry, and there are some traditions where hidden patterns (verbal or numerical) are a factor in aesthetic judgement. Dante's work has quite a lot of patterns, and Hebrew theologians have a sharp eye for such details. Fowler in his preface to Silent Poetry even suggests that "numerology in prose fiction was still relatively intricate as late as Fielding's Joseph Andrews". Some Oulipians claim that if an author does not define his or her constraint, the constraint will in turn define their work for them.

I think Formal prose might benefit from being short. I'm surprized that there isn't more short formal prose around. See

• Unusual structures in-flash fiction part i by Sophie van Llewyn
• Unusual structures in flash fiction part ii by Sophie van Llewyn

Reader/Marketing considerations

Some poems (even plain verse) would lose little by being formatted as prose, but short prose is currently hard to publish (in the UK, at least), so more often one will see short prose formatted as poetry in magazines. The choice is as much a marketing decision as something bound up with the intrinsic nature of the words (after all, prose can be iambic, and poetry can lack line-breaks). Pieces written as prose (or prose-poems) appear in poetry anthologies

"Flash Fiction" has been proposed as a way to rekindle readers' interest in non-novel prose. It's been suggested that people don't read short stories because

• stories take a long time to read compared to poems
• compared to novels (and series of novels) they're too short.

I doubt whether "Flash Fiction" is any easier in this regard. A "Flash Fiction" anthology is a struggle to read. When authors stray from standard forms readers take longer to tune in, and will often need to read the piece twice (as they would a poem). But will they? Try the following. Are they successful? How would you categorise them? Would you re-read them?

• Michael Benedikt
• The Music (Chard de Niord)
• Our Prosthesis (Shannon Bramer)
• "The Colonel" (Carolyn Forché)
• Missing (tarabc)