Hint Fiction

Tzara

Continental
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Aug 2, 2005
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Hello.

I’ve been thinking about fiction lately, short fiction, very short fiction, and how that relates to poetry.

There is a very real connection. Flash fiction anthologies, for example, often contain work by writers known mainly as poets. This could be, of course, the poet extending him- or herself into a slightly more wordy and fictive arena, but it might also mean that, once one takes the line breaks out, very short stories are very like poems.

Not always, but often.

Let me cite an example. One of my favorite poems (and I do think of it as a poem, despite it looking like flash fiction) is Robert Hass’s “A Story About the Body”:
The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity—like music—withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl—she must have swept them from the corners of her studio—was full of dead bees.​
This sure as hell looks to me like short fiction—there is dramatic development, conflict, resolution.

Yet it somehow seems poetic. Hass seems to think it’s a poem, as he included it in his poetry collection Human Wishes, along with several other similar prose poems.

All of which is my roundabout way of talking about “hint fiction.”

Hint fiction, as defined by a relatively recent anthology, is a story told in twenty-five words or less. As such, it depends very much on the reader’s (mental) expansion of the story. How the reader “reads between the lines,” so to speak.

So try one. You have twenty-five words. Be descriptive and concrete in your imagery (in other words, use your poetry skills), yet be narrative.

Here’s my first try, which is not very good:
MATCH.COM

She texted her picture before we met. Open, pleasant face. A very nice body. Unclothed.

I made many errors thumbing in my response.​
OK. I've publically embarrassed myself. Now you try. :)
 
special cuddles

trepidation as we move together, first time in months, kids are asleep,
lights off, after all these years I still tingle like our first time
 
Inversion

A month of drought, air bending heat. Finally, rain horizontal. Constant lightning, like blood through sky-veins.

Meanwhile, at home, no electricity, no water.
 
Blocked

Once upon a time, fairly recently, actually; a poet’s muse went missing. After a lengthy search, he found her shacked up with a jingle writer.
 
Hope Springs Eternal

The music was cool and fresh as a breeze so she pirouetted to the window dreaming the scent of spring, the ground muddy and promising.
 
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I shouldn't be here, not really, I died but you brought me back in a dream of what you thought my life should have been.
 
He said you were just like any other girl who lived and died. Then we cried because yes it was true and no it wasn't.
 
He said you were just like any other girl who lived and died. Then we cried because yes it was true and no it wasn't.

I mentally replaced "you" with "I" (He said I was just...). That way, "I" am a ghost (not like any other girl who died). ;)
 
I mentally replaced "you" with "I" (He said I was just...). That way, "I" am a ghost (not like any other girl who died). ;)

That would work and with a nice twist, too, but I envision this as two people talking about someone else who died. It also occurred to me that any of these sentences would be great openings for short stories.

It's interesting trying to find a balance between poetry and prose. And I am expanding my repertoire from 17 syllables to 25 words. :D
 
Virginia

Her hair was long, dark and straight. It shone in the car's dome light. She turned and said, "This isn't really a date, you know."
 
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Since losing her hand, she wore his ring on a chain between her breasts. He'd sometimes glimpse it, and be reminded of her slender fingers.
 
In a graveyard, floodwaters entomb saint and sinner alike ~ inscriptions three-quarters hidden. In the morgue, bodies are stacked, chilled and numbered, awaiting drier days.
 
Swans gather, pristine against the muddy brown of their newly-expanded habitat. Long necks riffle lawns and flowerbeds alike, or arch regally past plate glass.
 
In a graveyard, floodwaters entomb saint and sinner alike ~ inscriptions three-quarters hidden. In the morgue, bodies are stacked, chilled and numbered, awaiting drier days.

I really like this. There is such a perfect contrast between those two sentences and yet the point of the second sentence--and to me, therefore, the poem--is dependent on the info in the first.
 
I really like this. There is such a perfect contrast between those two sentences and yet the point of the second sentence--and to me, therefore, the poem--is dependent on the info in the first.

http://news.images.itv.com/image/file/337665/image_update_img.jpg

unfortunately it's not unique. when the waters do finally leave the land, the mess they're going to leave will be almost as big a shock, i think.

and thankyou. inspiration comes where it will. at least the dead won't complain.
 
Swans gather, pristine against the muddy brown of their newly-expanded habitat. Long necks riffle lawns and flowerbeds alike, or arch regally past plate glass.

http://news.images.itv.com/image/file/337665/image_update_img.jpg

unfortunately it's not unique. when the waters do finally leave the land, the mess they're going to leave will be almost as big a shock, i think.

and thankyou. inspiration comes where it will. at least the dead won't complain.

Given the subject of water/flooding, I imagined you were drawing from things you're seeing around you. The swan piece would be a funny scene in a post-apocalyptic Hollywood movie, but it's tragic that it might be happening to people right now, in real life.
 
News

They woke us children up. "Your father is at the hospital," she said, but quickly added "he'll be fine."

He was relieved. I knew better.
 
News

They woke us children up. "Your father is at the hospital," she said, but quickly added "he'll be fine."

He was relieved. I knew better.

strong.

anyone experiencing a small problem counting words instead of syllables, or is it just me? makes me have to count on my fingers or, even more embarrassing, touch the screen as i count 'em off :eek: :eek:
 
http://i.imgur.com/75EDGFJ.jpg
from a flooded worcester today

*sigh* Pretty soon we won't need those apocalypse movies anymore, it seems. That's the planet trying to "shake us off like fleas", as George Carlin would say.

It's never been so hot before here where I live. I consider 32ºC a very hot summer day, but it's been 38ºC every day since December, with a 42ºC thrown in for good measure...

strong.

anyone experiencing a small problem counting words instead of syllables, or is it just me? makes me have to count on my fingers or, even more embarrassing, touch the screen as i count 'em off :eek: :eek:

No, of course not! Counting on my fingers, hah. That would be silly.

(I always use my fingers to count, be it syllables or words, haha. :eek:)
 
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*sigh* Pretty soon we won't need those apocalypse movies anymore, it seems. That's the planet trying to "shake us off like fleas", as George Carlin would say.

It's never been so hot before here where I live. I consider 32ºC a very hot summer day, but it's been 38ºC every day since December, with a 42ºC thrown in for good measure...



No, of course not! Counting on my fingers, hah. That would be silly.

(I always use my fingers to count, be it syllables or words, haha. :eek:)
some of the comments, though, make funny reading :D
That's one cluster of beakshit crazy white feather deaths.
 
strong.

anyone experiencing a small problem counting words instead of syllables, or is it just me? makes me have to count on my fingers or, even more embarrassing, touch the screen as i count 'em off :eek: :eek:

I just cut and paste out of Word since it has a counter built into it. Words are almost always easier to count than syllables, 'specially when you factor in slurring and elision or dialectal differences in pronunciation.
 
I just cut and paste out of Word since it has a counter built into it. Words are almost always easier to count than syllables, 'specially when you factor in slurring and elision or dialectal differences in pronunciation.
i can do it, but i hear syllables easily and have counted them most the time for any specific poetry 'thing'. counting words i trip up, as i'll find i've counted more than once in one word if it's multisyllabic. it's a silly thing but i absolutely have to concentrate on it.
 
i can do it, but i hear syllables easily and have counted them most the time for any specific poetry 'thing'. counting words i trip up, as i'll find i've counted more than once in one word if it's multisyllabic. it's a silly thing but i absolutely have to concentrate on it.

Me too. I sometimes notice I'm counting syllables instead of words, and start again. Then I mess it up again. Then I lose count... :eek:
 
wanted

he's short, pale green, with a skinny little rump and some special powers. but oh, his eyes: a world - a universe - spins coolly in them.
 
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