Here's a link to my recently published flash fiction story Relations.
It was published in the winter edition of The Phare, an online magazine which celebrates creativity and offers resources to emerging writers. The other flash pieces are great reads, especially this moving piece set in a West Bank check point.
The premise of Flash Fiction is that it's a story that cannot go over 500 words. Reading through the other Winter entries in The Phare, I was struck by how convincingly worlds and lives can be captured in such few words. It made me wonder if actually it's restriction and limitation, not freedom, which are the better food for creativity.
The Oulipo school of writing takes this premise to the extreme. A very very brief history is that in the 1960s a group of French guys (yes, only men) including mathematicians gathered together, set some ridiculous rules, and wrote some stuff. But the rules weren't just a story in 500 words. One dude wrote an entire novel without the letter 'e'. Given that this letter appears in 15% of all French vocabulary, the original language of the novel, this is quite a feat. Other ridiculous constraints included matching the word length to the digits of Pie, and replacing every noun with the seventh noun after it in the dictionary. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single manufacturer in possession of a good fossil, must be in want of a winner.
But the counterargument can always be made: maybe the impact of the work is only in its artifice. How impressive, you may say, a poem with only one vowel sound, or a short story where each word is one letter longer than the last. Impressive, true, but are these works capable of genuinely connecting to and moving an audience? That depends, as always, on the work itself. Art, after all, is in the eye of the beholder.
In teacher training, you're told to throw in constraints to add challenge to the top performing students; but maybe restraints can also structure thinking, encourage innovation and support divergent problem solving at all levels. Many psychological experiments have proven that restricting resources leads to more creative outcomes, and in his book, The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz argues that too many decisions leads to fatigue, killing creativity.
Not that I'm going to start writing a new novel with only the letter Z, but perhaps a few Oulipo activities, or even some more flash fiction stuff, will keep my writing agile, fun, and creative. Here's to hoping!
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