Commonword Blogs

Flash fiction, catching up with us all. Maybe it should be bling rather than flash. Like the story but it floats somewhat for me, meaning that I know from the outset how it’s going to play out as a sequence of events, and the events float on top of the emotions which are referred to without being revealed.

Example, the first line. You tell the reader how to understand the character and then only partially develop : the reluctance is linked to the scepticism, the unshaven is the stress of being out of work. Easy for the reader to infer but more difficult for them to feel. Part of the reason I think why the end has relatively little impact. When you have a few pages the technique you employ here can build suggestion and inference so that the reader becomes more involved with the character, but in under 600 words it would help if you could find a way of being more immediate.

As a suggestion look at your description in the opening paragraph: neutral with little modification, i.e. an impartial observer. Hemingway does this brilliantly by introducing tension that is not only implied but felt (which of course draws attention to the fact that the impartial third person observer is not impartial at all). Your technique is similar to his in that the modifiers in your opening paragraph are all adjectives and, with the exception of portly, more or less neutral. What you don’t do that Hemingway does is use them to build effect and emphasise association and contrast. There is an association between Ganesh and Panditji because of ‘large’ and ‘portly’, and contrast with ‘small forehead’, but there’s not enough of it to have much effect on the reader. You also don’t create tension in the relationship, it is clearly defined in the opening line : young man, Pandit at Pandit’s house.

Compare your opening paragraph to Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’.

The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went to Madrid.

The passage not only brilliantly evokes what the setting looks like but what it feels like, and essentially it does so with only 16 out of the 132 words, which are :
‘no shade… sun… close…warm shadow…The American and the girl with him…shade…very hot’

An absence of shade which when it does occur reinforces the heat of the sun. Tension in a relationship, which foregrounds and contrasts political, gender and possibly age differences. Associations and disparities implied. Tension reinforced : it is very hot and they are waiting.

The reader, whether they want to or not, is compelled to make some kind of association and as a consequence to feel. It’s a very skilful manipulation. There’s no reason why you can’t do the same with your piece, Add a couple of lines, change a couple of the others, and Bob’s your uncle (unless, of course, he’s had a sex change operation, in which case he’s your auntie).