Post by AnimaStone on Mar 24, 2005 18:09:07 GMT -5
In case you were wondering, yes, sudden fiction is an actual genre. It is also known as flash fiction. This is a piece in that genre.
[glow=purple,2,300]Sudden Fiction[/glow]
spaceWe were supposed to write a sudden fiction. A sudden fiction, I said, What’s that? And I capitalized the What even when I spoke to make sure that the big man in the shiny white Oxford shirt understood what I meant. A sudden fiction is a work of fiction that is very short, usually only two or three pages long, he said, haven’t you been listening? And I said I have been listening but I just wanted to make sure. Phew. The big man almost got me there, but I saved myself. But there was still the problem of having to write the sudden fiction. Funny that he said it was a work. More like it was just a piece.
spaceSo I sat at my computer and stared at it for a while, waiting for the sudden fiction to just appear on the computer screen like the last essay I wrote for the big man did. No such luck, though, so I started aimlessly hitting the keys, hoping that chaos theory would come true and that this would be the one sequence in a million years that actually did anything. The theory is overrated. I erased the page, then started over, document two. But I was forgetting something. What was it that the big man said? Oh yeah, a truth. Sudden fiction has a disclosure plot, he said, which means that its whole point is to disclose a fact or truth. A mimetic plot mimes the real world and has characters that change over time, he said. That’s why you almost never see a full-length novel with a disclosure plot or a sudden fiction with a mimetic plot, he said. I kept quiet, knowing that he was in his comfort zone talking about literary plots and that anything I did to bring him out of that comfort zone would mean we would actually have to do something. So I stayed silent. For the good of me. For the good of us all. It didn’t work, though. The big man assigned us the sudden fiction anyway.
spaceBack to the point. I needed a truth. I had everything good to go: a blank page, a blank plot, and a blank mind, but I needed a truth to blacken them in. Problem was, all the truths were taken. That seriously put a damper on my efforts. What truth could I hope to expose, when every one of them already had a thousand poems to its name? The thieves of yesterday didn’t even know what they stole. I couldn’t use one of those pilfered universals. The big man in the shiny white Oxford shirt (it needed a truth to blacken it in, too) was sure not to like the prospect. Not from me. From a million other people, maybe, but not me. And even if the big man didn’t care that it was me, or he forgot it was me, I wouldn’t want to use them either. It would just be too unoriginal, and I wouldn’t do it. Maybe that’s why the big man cares when it’s my case.
spaceI couldn’t make my own truth. Other people, other writers can get away with it. People like me aren’t allowed to bend reality. We don’t wait up for reality, so it bends to fit us, but when we try to bend it all it does is bend us. Karl Marx tried. He got away with it for a while, but he’s catching it now. We always do. The big man wouldn’t understand that if I told him, so I won’t even try. Instead, I decided to just not create my own truth for the sudden fiction. He would notice, but he was used to it by then so he wouldn’t care. He only really cared if I tried to take back one of the truths that was stolen from me before I was born.
spaceI guessed at that point that I would have to do what I always do. I started typing again, creating a dark, imprisoning, but slightly entertaining labyrinth of words on the page in front of me. Once the big man started reading it, he’d be lost in it for days. Once he reemerged, exhausted and dehydrated, his Oxford shirt coated with dust and decay, he would be thankful to just be out and he wouldn’t care that there was, for all the corridors and grand arches and ballrooms and stony doors, no truth hidden anywhere in that labyrinth. I clicked print.
spaceThe next day, I handed in my sudden fiction. The big man told us to read from our books while he started grading the assignments. Mine was at the top of the stack. I watched him over the top of the yellowed pages, seeing him scan through it, making a few marks, then turning back to the first page and writing something at the top. After the bell announced the end of the period, I walked by the teacher’s desk. Your sudden fiction was very good, the big man said, I liked the point you had to make.
[glow=purple,2,300]Sudden Fiction[/glow]
spaceWe were supposed to write a sudden fiction. A sudden fiction, I said, What’s that? And I capitalized the What even when I spoke to make sure that the big man in the shiny white Oxford shirt understood what I meant. A sudden fiction is a work of fiction that is very short, usually only two or three pages long, he said, haven’t you been listening? And I said I have been listening but I just wanted to make sure. Phew. The big man almost got me there, but I saved myself. But there was still the problem of having to write the sudden fiction. Funny that he said it was a work. More like it was just a piece.
spaceSo I sat at my computer and stared at it for a while, waiting for the sudden fiction to just appear on the computer screen like the last essay I wrote for the big man did. No such luck, though, so I started aimlessly hitting the keys, hoping that chaos theory would come true and that this would be the one sequence in a million years that actually did anything. The theory is overrated. I erased the page, then started over, document two. But I was forgetting something. What was it that the big man said? Oh yeah, a truth. Sudden fiction has a disclosure plot, he said, which means that its whole point is to disclose a fact or truth. A mimetic plot mimes the real world and has characters that change over time, he said. That’s why you almost never see a full-length novel with a disclosure plot or a sudden fiction with a mimetic plot, he said. I kept quiet, knowing that he was in his comfort zone talking about literary plots and that anything I did to bring him out of that comfort zone would mean we would actually have to do something. So I stayed silent. For the good of me. For the good of us all. It didn’t work, though. The big man assigned us the sudden fiction anyway.
spaceBack to the point. I needed a truth. I had everything good to go: a blank page, a blank plot, and a blank mind, but I needed a truth to blacken them in. Problem was, all the truths were taken. That seriously put a damper on my efforts. What truth could I hope to expose, when every one of them already had a thousand poems to its name? The thieves of yesterday didn’t even know what they stole. I couldn’t use one of those pilfered universals. The big man in the shiny white Oxford shirt (it needed a truth to blacken it in, too) was sure not to like the prospect. Not from me. From a million other people, maybe, but not me. And even if the big man didn’t care that it was me, or he forgot it was me, I wouldn’t want to use them either. It would just be too unoriginal, and I wouldn’t do it. Maybe that’s why the big man cares when it’s my case.
spaceI couldn’t make my own truth. Other people, other writers can get away with it. People like me aren’t allowed to bend reality. We don’t wait up for reality, so it bends to fit us, but when we try to bend it all it does is bend us. Karl Marx tried. He got away with it for a while, but he’s catching it now. We always do. The big man wouldn’t understand that if I told him, so I won’t even try. Instead, I decided to just not create my own truth for the sudden fiction. He would notice, but he was used to it by then so he wouldn’t care. He only really cared if I tried to take back one of the truths that was stolen from me before I was born.
spaceI guessed at that point that I would have to do what I always do. I started typing again, creating a dark, imprisoning, but slightly entertaining labyrinth of words on the page in front of me. Once the big man started reading it, he’d be lost in it for days. Once he reemerged, exhausted and dehydrated, his Oxford shirt coated with dust and decay, he would be thankful to just be out and he wouldn’t care that there was, for all the corridors and grand arches and ballrooms and stony doors, no truth hidden anywhere in that labyrinth. I clicked print.
spaceThe next day, I handed in my sudden fiction. The big man told us to read from our books while he started grading the assignments. Mine was at the top of the stack. I watched him over the top of the yellowed pages, seeing him scan through it, making a few marks, then turning back to the first page and writing something at the top. After the bell announced the end of the period, I walked by the teacher’s desk. Your sudden fiction was very good, the big man said, I liked the point you had to make.