NUNUM - Blending Flash Fiction & Art

Raising the Stakes in Flash Fiction by Melanie Faith

​My writing students are on  their last week of the semester. Usually, this would be cause for great celebration, but it so happens that in this last week the university requires a final project that is the culmination of our entire course. The projects are generally 10-12 pages long and worth many more points than their weekly papers. My students are busy applying all of the reading, research, discussions, and suggestions from their practice (read: homework exercises) from the past ten weeks, so understandably I’ve been answering many messages filled with questions and concerns.

Raising the Stakes in Flash Fiction by Melanie Faith

NUNUM - Blending Flash Fiction & Art

Flash Fiction - Belle of the Ball

Flash fiction is the belle of the  ball, the flavour of the moment, the soup of the day and apparently well on its way to mainstream acceptance as a separate and unique form of writing. Recent articles in mainstream publications like O Magazine and MacLean’s had articles and pieces of flash as well, most literary journals now have separate submission categories for flash submissions and there are more and more flash only journals out there now.

NUNUM - Blending Flash Fiction & Art

So What If You Don't Get Anywhere In A Flash
​by Amie E. Reilly

A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. -Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951) ​

I was cleaning a winter's worth of debris from the garden

NUNUM - Blending Flash Fiction & Art

Nuts & Bolts Behind the NUNUM Aesthetic: Part 11

The End

The idea of plot or the story itself was mentioned several times previously but never expanded on too much but it is a part of flash fiction just as it is in other forms of fiction. Returning to the example of the man in the airport,  ​“An inattentive, transient jackass says, – “Check it” – high-pitched, estrogenic sound awkwardly steam from thick, too-big lips covering precarious tan teeth. Mirrored sunglasses sterilize eyes plunging transgressor back to fatigued, faded skin, unkempt hair – a mind of questions, comments, demands, justifications – stayed verbally, exposed physically – “Is there a problem?” Pigments, parchments, binding,

NUNUM - Blending Flash Fiction & Art

Nuts & Bolts of the NUNUM Aesthetic: Part 10

So then, plot does not matter

It does, of course, but it gets to it in a different way. The primary focus of flash fiction is to present mental associations through words to the reader that will allow the reader to enter into whatever memory or knowledge they have which mirrors the associations of the character in the story at that moment in the piece of flash fiction.

NUNUM - Blending Flash Fiction & Art

Nuts & Bolts of the NUNUM Aesthetic: Part 9

You do not have to try

Going back to the flash fiction example again,  “An inattentive, transient jackass says, – “Check it” – high-pitched, estrogenic sound awkwardly steam from thick, too-big lips covering precarious tan teeth. Mirrored sunglasses sterilize eyes plunging transgressor back to fatigued, faded skin, unkempt hair – a brain of questions, comments, demands, justifications – stayed verbally, exposed physically – “Is there a problem?” Pigments, parchments, binding, images relapse then release ribbed steel, scuffed plastic, relabeled boxes reskinned with tape, twine, and plastic that meld into a horizontal borough in motion, eclectic and naïve to the pigment of deities” (Miller, 2012).

NUNUM - Blending Flash Fiction & Art

Nuts & Bolts of the NUNUM Aesthetic: Part 8

A reader holds a vast store of knowledge, experiences and memories that are uniquely networked to create a neural lattice-like topography of concept associations in their brain. Many traditional narrative pieces of fiction will introduce a concept within a certain situation, with a certain type of character(s). Then the story will move the reader systematically or connection by connection (association by association) through the narrative arch of the story, all the while providing the reader with the necessary information from which to recreate the reality of the story, the plot, within their brain.

NUNUM - Blending Flash Fiction & Art

Nuts & Bolts of the NUNUM Aesthetic: Part 7

Using memory associations and the soil which holds them in writing

Any form of writing requires ​the associations of the reader to interact with the text so that the reader can understand the words and ideas being presented. In a traditional piece of fiction using a third person narrative voice the writer attempts to elaborate the world inhabited by their