An unedited essay on the fly about flashes in Flash Friday

This is my take on flashes, short fiction, not running naked through the commons. My take on running naked through the commons is; go for it, it’ll look good on your resume. I’ll come at it sideways, but it’s important to restate that this is my take, it’s not a guide and I’m in no way, shape or form suggesting it should be yours.

Ever since Brando shouted Stella on the big screen method acting has been the standard from summer school for kids to serious students to community retirees. It’ll start off simple and abstract like “Ok, you all are eggs get on the floor and feel your eggness. You are a live chick. Feel the egg and then slowly begin your birth. And you have a bunch of kids, students, old people, rolling around on the floor and trying to become baby chicks. Later on there will be exercises where a scene calls for an extreme emotion and the teacher will instruct you to get in touch with some similar extreme moment in your real life.

Here’s my belief; you can either do that or you can’t and even more to the point you can either make that play on the stage or you can’t. That’s really what people mean by ‘born with talent’ --- it’s going to be hard work for anyone, a painter, musician, actor, writer, and the idea is to make it look easy, but that one hurdle you need over at the very beginning, all the work in the world won’t get you there, well, maybe with a shrink.

I mean anyone should be able to do the egg. It’s the taking your own trauma and turning it into art that’s hard. I think writers, musicians and painters have an easier time of it; Actors have to nowhere to hide; you can’t really hide in a character, the character has your face.

So, what the fuck does this have to do with flashes? It’s why I didn’t object to the timeline, I want to say that years ago I was in on the development of the current incarnation of flash Friday; organization all goes to G, motivation to Dreamerrising, I think I was there to round it out and I didn’t veto any idea or add much of anything but tacit approval and flashes. The timeline, in my mind, is the opposite of method acting, what a writer really needs to practice, getting out of his/her head and into the world. I mean you really can’t escape the idea that on some level every character is you or that the characters are what really plays, all the plots have been used up. And so you strut and fret hours on the page, deleting, polishing, making kinder or meaner or, I don’t know, less obviously you and you wind up with something perhaps a little too safe or purposely unsafe but in a safe way.

When you have a time limit you don’t have the luxury of being a fucking egg for a half hour, you have to hatch and hit the ground running. This isn’t art, these flashes, they are pain, joy, sorrow, lust, greed, pride, fear, love, empathy --- the less you think about them the more it is. And yeah, most of it is trash, it’s not pretty, you don’t want your name (even your fake online pseudonym) associated with it. It’s entirely not the point.

If I were trying to impress or pick up chicks with flashes, I would totally cheat and somewhere in the rules it is written that if you have to go ahead and cheat. 45 minutes is arbitrary, or it is to me anyway, I don’t know why 45 minutes it’s what they came up with and I agreed. Mostly these things take twenty. I think when you don’t watch the clock they take even less.

And it’s not just all the greed and love and shit that the time limit keeps you from filtering; it keeps you from trotting out some smooth voice, a slick narrator or hip or clever, you pick your hatchlings voice, hit the ground running, and ride the voice to the end. Yes, those of us who have been doing it a while think about them for a few so when we start we have a bit of a roadmap in our heads. I’ve gone back to square one though, I need too, too much going on around me, I don’t watch the clock, I don’t think about them, I’m probably doing them in under fifteen minutes and they don’t come out pretty at all. They come out more like chickens entrails than hatchlings, the sort of thing the old ta-tom Ma-kut voodoo lady can read my future in. It looks bleak. I can use bleak. I know bleak.

I will be the first one to say --- next to a dream diary the thing other people are least interested in is your fiction-as-therapy. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. The trick if you’re going to post it though is to either develop a set of chops that make it look interesting or, and this is the better of the two, not give a flying fuck. In one respect all art is therapy. The two differences between Van Gough making weird looking sunflowers and your three year old making them are

1) You love your baby and he/she is brilliant in everything he/she does And

2) Vincent learned how to paint first.

Like any sport or any art or, I submit any human endeavor; leave it all on the page, don’t hold back and don’t be afraid. It may not be pretty, it may not be art, but it will always be cathartic. I mean Van Gough learned to be an artist first; he had a set of chops. But those sunflowers aren’t technique, it’s blood on the canvas, it’s a mind breaking down, it’s joy and lust and pain and greed and pride and cum and guts and blood and fever and madness and clarity and fear and love and just a vase of sunflowers.

I don’t expect any of my flashes to hang in the Louvre. They are teaching me how to paint sunflowers though.