The Flash Novel: Flash Fiction Meets the Novel or Chocolate Meets Peanut Butter

March 7, 2023 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

The Flash Novel: Flash Fiction Meets the Novel or Chocolate Meets Peanut Butter

For many years I was haunted by a story. I abandoned and revisited it endlessly. Each time I tried to write it kept bumping against the boundaries of the traditional novel: chapters, plot, back story, bulk, a finish line of 60,000 words. The story I wanted to tell was being smothered within these constraints. I knew someday I would have to get it out, I just didn’t know how.

Then in 2007 I discovered flash fiction. In my book Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction, I share how the form was a game-changer for me and forced me to re-imagine myself as a story teller who could dwell in these small, curated spaces. I also encouraged me to think like a poet–every word must be absolutely necessary in the distillation process.

Before the term “flash fiction” became widespread, stories under 1,000 words were often marooned in a wasteland—not long enough to be taken seriously or compete with their hefty siblings. Making use of tools like erasure, ambiguity and implication, flash fiction as a legitimate genre has reinvented how we tell a story.

But…I also love novels.

So. what happens if you put the peanut butter inside the chocolate?

That was the question I was pondering in 2009 as I finished graduate school: what do we call a work that is both compressed and epic? Distilled, but with sweeping vision? Flash fiction and the novel, two genres that couldn’t be farther apart on the literary continuum, and yet, perhaps because I had experience writing both, it seemed natural for me to put them together. Carving away the excess, eliminating all but the most essential, I began to tell that old story in a new way.

After the Rapture is the result of that initial investigation: made of individual flash pieces that mosaic together to tell the story of The Rapture and its Aftermath, it was birthed in the sweet spot, the humming, sizzling, potent possibility between flash fiction and the novel.

Meet the flash novel, a breakout genre conceived to tell a large-scope story in a compact space. Flash novels (sometimes called flash novellas, novels-in-flash, etc.) are not bloated short stories, nor are they failed or whittled down novels. With the complexity of a novel, the size of a novella, and the ingenuity of flash fiction, the flash novel is a new type of book, delivering a sophisticated reading experience in a small arena. New thought requires new terminology.

The flash novel does for the novel what flash fiction did for the story: puts it through a literary dehydrator, leaving the meat without the fat. There is often a cinematic quality akin to watching a movie, and every sentence, every word takes on a new significance if only for the limited number of them. The book creates a sense of urgency that commands the reader to “pay close attention.” The gaps between what isn’t said become like synapses, spaces for the reader to enter and make the piece their own. It is this act of interpretation that keeps art vital.

Writing a flash novel also satisfies multiple urges—the quick payoff of writing flash fiction with the long-term relationship that is writing a novel. It encourages us to break the big idea like a sheet of glass and then gather up the pieces into new and beautiful shapes. We are creating a big picture made of tiny pictures. Which, when you think about it, is a lot like life.

When the world changes, art must change. Writers are changing. Readers are changing. And the flash novel answers a call, acts against convention, and asks us to surrender to the work, get out of the way and write what wants to be written. The best ideas rarely fit into neat checkboxes.

AFTER THE RAPTURE

AFTER THE RAPTURE: In a world just slant from our own, the people are waiting for the Rapture. But what they get is not at all what they thought it would be. Whether they’re pilgrimaging to the Very First Kentucky Fried Chicken, living in life-sized Barbie houses, taking the Marriott staff hostage, trading Candy Corn on Wall Street or draining Loch Ness to “find out the goddamn truth once and for all,” there is a familiar sort of desperation in this post-Rapture existence. In moments you will laugh at the absurdity of their world, and in other moments the darkness will feel all too familiar…

“In this world of Walmarts, Barbies, Kens, orgies/time-shares, 7-11s, clones, a red Lake Michigan, and dreams, Nancy Stohlman’s humor and talent shines. The rapture becomes more than just a rapture: it’s a world turning on its head, acceptance, and then finding a new normal. Redeeming and heart-felt, this dystopian novel-in-flashes is one not to forget. AFTER THE RAPTURE is a rapture!”–Kim Chinquee, three-time Pushcart Prize winner, author of seven collections and the novel, Pipette

“AFTER THE RAPTURE is a startling, rhapsodic, brilliant tome. Stohlman dares to venture into an intricate mosaic of layered, futuristic identities, individualities, and lives both wasted and yet fully explored. A dazzling oscillation of scintillating prose, on the threshold between the ephemeral and the eternal. After the Rapture is a book full of surprise and wonder, a compelling and majestic book.”–Robert Vaughan, author of Askew, Funhouse and Addicts & Basements

“Mesmerizing, challenging, funny, awesome, entertaining, bewildering, full of doom, wisdom, absurdity, and heart. I love how gigantic and scary Biblical personages and events are swallowed up by commercial / pop culture. Itís ridiculous, genius, and moving, all at the same time.”–Robert Shapard, co-editor of the Norton Flash Fiction anthologies Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction Forward, and Flash Fiction International

Buy After the Rapture from Mason Jar Press HERE

AMAZON HERE

Nancy Stohlman is the author of six books including After the Rapture (2023), Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities (2018), The Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories (2014), The Monster Opera (2013), Searching for Suzi: a flash novel (2009), and Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction (2020), winner of the 2021 Reader Views Gold Award and re-released in 2022 as an audiobook. Her work has been anthologized widely, appearing in the Norton anthology New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction and The Best Small Fictions 2019, as well as adapted for both stage and screen. She teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder and holds workshops and retreats around the world. Find out more at http://www.nancystohlman.com