Another little essay of mine on flash fiction was just posted over at Flash Fiction Chronicles today, ‘Frame Your Flash, Don’t Fence It In.’ It’s about the world outside the story, the world beyond the ‘frame’ of the piece — and in the case of flash fiction that is a very small frame indeed, under 1,000 words. This world outside — sometimes existing in a writer’s notes, sometimes the object of pure, spontaneous bluffing on the part of the writer, is one of the things that gives fiction a sense of believability and verisimilitude:
But think of flash fiction — indeed, all fiction — as being surrounded not by a fence, but a window frame. When we look out the window from a fixed position we see only a slice of the world itself. Prior experience tells us there is more to the world than meets the eye, but so too do various clues in the scene itself — perhaps we only see a part of a road, or the shadow of a tree, or, indeed, neighbors moving in and out of frame. Good, evocative fiction should do this too, it should hint at a larger world.
This is even more important for speculative fiction — since the worlds of spec fic are not the world that readers themselves live in and, by extension, believe in. I go on to talk about the various tricks one uses to achieve this, not the least of which is getting yourself into a mindset where you, the author, believe the truth of what you are writing. When you believe in the world outside of the frame, it’s much easier to hint at, and much easier to get your audience to harness their own imaginations in service of your story. For, when the audience starts conjuring their own conception of the world beyond the frame — perhaps even betraying some disappointment that more of this world was not given to them! — then the writer knows they have achieved the great feat of illusion that is central to storytelling.
