From Firefly to Bee Hive: An Interview with Grant Faulkner
Grant Faulkner | The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story | University of New Mexico Press | 2023 | 163 Pages
Many are familiar with the Mark Twain quote: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Flash Fiction, the short-form genre, is the embodiment of this paradox. It’s a small space where you can tell big stories. It’s a small space where you can also tell small stories, vignettes and memories and gentle glimpses of moments. A writer can overwhelm the compressed form with sentences like staircases and waterfalls or rest in the white space, letting silence tell more than syntax. Grant Faulkner’s new book, The Art of Brevity, looks at all of these techniques and paradoxes–how great storytelling in flash fiction is reflected in both what one does and doesn’t do–and the vastness of freedom that flourishes in the constraint of smallness.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Tucker Leighty-Phillips: Congratulations on The Art of Brevity! How long has this book been in the works? What inspired you to start it?
Grant Faulkner: It’s a funny thing about books because I don’t remember when I actually started writing it or how to date it. I started jotting notes on my thoughts on the aesthetic of brevity years ago, when I first became addicted to writing 100-word stories, and then I’ve published several essays on flash fiction and teach it and speak about it often, so I guess you could say I started the book 10 years or so ago.
I was inspired to write it because writing short is such a riddle and a mystery. It’s like playing the Ouija board, in that you’re speaking with ghosts, and you don’t have access to the full story. It’s an ineffable, numinous form that’s full of different contours and spawns so many different types of storytelling containers. I love the form because it invites a different type of storytelling than longer forms, so I needed to write this book.
An aesthetic is an existential view of the world, and I find the aesthetic of brevity so compelling for the many different windows it opens.
TLP: Your book emphasizes the role of what is not present in flash fiction. You focus on the undoing of processes, the unknowing of parts of narrative. “I love objects that are decaying,” you say in regard to white space. Much of this feels in line with the form—doing away with what isn’t necessary, maintaining only the essential components, leaving the beating heart of the thing. But is there room for maximalism in flash fiction? Are there flash or short-short writers you enjoy who are packing the suitcase til it chokes?
GF: What an interesting question. And, yes, there is room for maximalism in flash. I like metaphors for writing, so just as you can think of flash as a single firefly in the darkness (to quote Molly Giles), it can also be a bee hive (or an overstuffed suitcase).
In the book, I discuss Ted McLoof ’s story “Space, Whether, and Why,” which is told in a single breathless sentence of 1,394 words. The story is not only an achievement of word count but of storytelling because there is nothing extraneous or gorged about McLoof ’s story—its beauty is the urgency and desperation of love that you feel in its containment.
Similarly, in Hananah Zaheer’s “Lovebirds,” she uses a long sentence of 703 words to capture the force of simultaneity, how one brief moment can contain a lifetime of emotions and memories. Other flash stories that are long, winding sentences include Kirstin Chen’s “Meine Liebe,” Jennifer Todhunter’s “The Levitation” and Gwen E. Kirby’s “Friday Night.” Using a small container of a story to tell a big and perhaps messy story gives it an interesting layer.
TLP: You have been around flash fiction for some time–can you talk a little about trends in flash fiction? What changes in the mode have you witnessed? Were there trends you expected to carry on that quietly went away, or styles of writing you saw as topical that became cemented in the form?
GF: I don’t focus very much on trends. I prefer to think of interesting ways to tell a story, and then how the aesthetic of writing can serve a larger existential purpose. So I’m more interested in innovative writing than a trend.
That said, I’ve often talked about how the aesthetic of brevity has ironically influenced my longer work, and there seems to be a trend among novels and memoirs of more elliptical styles of writing that emphasize the fragmentary nature of life and feel more collage-like. That’s the thing about a trend: just when you think you’re doing something new and original, it turns out you’re just one of many.
I’m very interested in going shorter: focusing on telling a story through single sentences that reside in conversation and counterpoint with each other and images. Maybe that’s another trend: hybrid writing.
TLP: This book really dives into the mechanics of flash fiction–how it operates, how it might operate, how it functions in ways both similar to and different from other forms (the novel, the poem, the haiku, etc). I have always found myself intrigued by the “found poem”—not the erasure style, but the more literal; a piece of writing found somewhere that, in its brevity and tone, feels poetic. You know, graffiti on a wall, a discarded note left on the subway, etc. I assume, given its size, there is also space for the “found fiction” (or the “found flash,” to be more specific). Have you found yourself stumbling upon pieces of text that felt like short fictions? Is it possible to enjoy something as a found fiction even if the intention was to relay a different kind of message?
GF: I’m like you: I love finding text that is intriguing or quirky and then putting it in a new context of a story, of art. Sometimes the text can be self-sufficient, so you don’t need to do anything with it. Sometimes it can operate like a prompt, spawning a story. I fill up my notebooks with a lot of stray snippets like this. In some ways it’s like Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, the readymade sculpture that was a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt.” The context is part of the art, so if you take text from a goofy spam email you receive and put it in the frame of a book or story, it’s suddenly something different.
In my book, I discuss how flash fiction lends itself to the form of found objects in a number of different ways. Lydia Davis has written about this—how she’ll stumble on an arresting line of text and become preoccupied with it and turn it into a story. This is one of the great benefits of an aesthetic of brevity: you pay attention to the small things in the world a little differently, so you think of storytelling a little differently.
TLP: You reference Italo Calvino, who regards his process as a “subtraction of weight” from people, places, and subjects in his stories–which feels akin to the “flattening” of characters in fairy tales. But of course, so much flash fiction barters in the addition of weight–taking small moments, giving them emotional gravity and heft. When writing your own work, how do you negotiate that sum of weight? Do you find yourself adding emotional depth and scaling it back? Or writing the minimal and bulking up after?
GF: I’ve often seen this question asked of authors, and I’ve asked it myself. But I don’t think writing in any form is either one: I think you’re always adding and subtracting, inhaling and exhaling, calibrating the balance of a story, thinking about what the right level of emotional depth is or how much omission is necessary to create the mood, the suspense, the texture of your story. So much of that process is intuitive, and so much of it is learned through a lot of writing and reading. A lot.
I think it’s mainly an aesthetic decision, in the end. Some authors are like Yasunari Kawabata, who was obsessed with capturing the essence of a story, so much so that he turned his acclaimed novel Snow Country into an eleven-page story, “Gleanings from Snow Country.” Other authors need their stories to be dense and vast and full of crisscrossing tentacles of story lines and sentences bursting with syntactic curlicues. Or there’s Borges, who somehow managed to convey huge, expansive stories in the space of just a couple of pages.
I like your phrase: to negotiate the sum of weight. That’s what we do as writers. That’s one definition of craft.
TLP: What did you learn about short-form fiction in this writing process? Were there surprises, or aspects of the form you didn’t anticipate?
GF: There were many surprises along the way—surprises of topics, of stories discovered, of what I learned while exploring the subject more deeply. I went deeper into my notions of collage by exploring Elizabeth Alexander’s discussion of the collage aesthetic as a fundamental Black art form because of “the way that it mirrors the process of taking from many places and recombining in the new space,” like a quilt made of many pieces of found fabrics. I expanded my notion of erasure to see how erasure can hold political poetics, how it is a tool of commentary, disruption, and decoding just as it is a tool of recreating and expressing. I also discovered so many new, amazing flash writers like K-Ming Chang, Veronica Montes, and Lucy Zhang.
The wonderful thing about writing about writing is how you peel off layer after layer to better understand not only your own aesthetic, but how that aesthetic is part of your soul, part of the way you approach life. An aesthetic is a type of lens you see the world through. This aesthetic helps me see what’s in between or not said, in particular—the little stories that exist in the nooks and crannies of life. But “little” doesn’t mean they are any less significant than a big story. Quite the opposite.
If your writing doesn’t surprise you, you should probably change your process. I’m a fan of Robert Frost’s quote: “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” I think every book, every story, needs to be a search, so I’m always searching in my writing, no matter if it’s nonfiction or fiction.
TLP: How do you reignite that spark of surprise when you find it waning?
GF: That’s a really good question, especially because it’s so easy to get stuck in a pattern, a viewpoint, an attitude. Ideally, I travel. I just went to Madrid, my first trip abroad since before the pandemic, and it was amazing to me how fresh the world became, how my mind seemed to leap back to a much younger and more open version of myself. I was digging a deep rut before that trip.
Short of Madrid, I get away from work for a day, if possible. Going to a matinee always feels a little like playing hooky. Going for a hike in the redwoods always feels a little like going to another planet. My daughter and I like to go on what we call “music drives” as well, where we just get in the car and drive aimlessly for hours. A car is a story always waiting to happen.
TLP: What’s next for you?
GF: The worst thing about writing this book is that it took a lot of work over a long period of time, as any book does, which means it took me away from writing fiction. I’ve never gone this long in my life without writing fiction. So now I’m looking forward to exploring brevity on the page, through the shapes of my stories. I think it will be interesting to see how writing this book has perhaps changed my own approach to writing.
TLP: In your chapter on titles, you ask the question, “Why can’t the title be at the end?”—which is a question I wanted to prod you about. In Joy Williams’ 99 Stories of God, her stories are technically numbered rather than titled, but each one carries a sort-of-encompassing footnote at the end–almost like an end title that reconceptualizes the text. Have you read this collection? How do you feel about the concept of a title being a tool of conclusion rather than introduction?
GF: Yes, I have read 99 Stories of God, and I admire it a lot. I generally like all attempts at playing with form and convention and messing things up. Because we have all of these grammar rules and units of text, from phrases to sentences to paragraphs to titles, etc., we forget that we can make the rules for any story we write.
So we’ll end with this: “Tucker Leighty-Phillips and Grant Faulkner Talk Beginnings and Endings.”
Or maybe: “An Endless Conversation About Brevity.”
Or: “The End Is Not Near.”
Grant Faulkner is the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. He has published two books on writing, Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo, and Brave the Page, a teen writing guide. He’s also published All the Comfort Sin Can Provide, a collection of short stories, Fissures, a collection of 100-word stories, and Nothing Short of 100: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story. His stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including Tin House, The Southwest Review, and The Gettysburg Review, and he has been anthologized in collections such as Norton’s New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction and Best Small Fictions. His essays on creativity have been published in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Lit Hub, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer. He serves on the National Writing Project’s Writer’s Council, Lit Camp’s Advisory Council, and Aspen Words’ Creative Council. He’s also the co-host of the podcast Write-minded.