The Nifty Approach to Writing

You might have noticed that my newsletter looks a little different this month. That’s because I’ve switched from Wix to Substack (for various niggly reasons). In a way this switch towards something new simply rounds out my month of newness. I’ve had the first running of my new #WriteBeyondTheLightbulb “Colourful Characters” course with a second session coming up in March. I’ve had the first sessions of my new “NIFTY Book club” which was a lovely opportunity to discuss Ali McGrane’s The Listening Project with writing friends. I’ve facilitated a new workshop called “Characters in Crisis” which is funded by my Arts Council England DYCP grant – I’ll be running this again later in the year. I’ve started a parallel newsletter called “Mondettes” where I’m documenting one piece of flash fiction I’ve admired for every day during 2023. And another thing which is very new is The Welkin Writing Prize, the deadline for which is just around the corner.

This theme of newness takes me neatly into my craft article for the month which is all about novellas-in-flash. The N-I-F is a form that in many ways is very new. But it is also not new, so perhaps a better description would be that it is very much in vogue within the flash fiction community right now. Lots of writers are excited by the form. But I’m sure there will also be readers who are scratching their heads. What exactly is a novella-in-flash (or a N-I-F to use its three-letter acronym)? What makes it different from a traditional novella? Why write a story in this way? What are the hallmarks of the form? What are the possibilities and the pitfalls? And what can all writers (irrespective of whether they are intending to write a N-I-F) learn from contemplating the way a N-I-F goes about telling its story?

The novella we’re reading this month as part of the NIFTY Book Club is The Regeneration of Stella Yin (Kristen Loesch | Ad Hoc Fiction) and I thought I might use that (as well as other N-I-F examples) to explore some of those questions.

What exactly is a novella-in-flash?

In his excellent craft book, Unlocking the Novella-in-Flash, Michael Loveday describes the N-I-F as “a short novel composed of individual but linked flash fictions.” We have a longer story that is broken up into bitesize chunks. The prose isn’t continuous and flowing. It is purposefully fragmentary. It makes use of silence and white space. The aim is often to put a big story into a small container. It is a form rather than a genre. Loveday describes it as “a vessel into which any genre of writing can be poured.”

But while the main thing that marks out a N-I-F is that fragmentary form, there are other hallmarks which suggest a work has shifted from the “traditional” method into the territory of “in-flash.” The feel of the writing, the way the characters come to life, the importance of place and time – these are all things that, for me, help differentiate a story told in-flash with a story told in a more traditional way.

Structure

A big question we should maybe ask is why would a writer take a story and fragment it into tiny pieces of flash? I think that’s a good question. With anything we sit down to write, I think we should always consider the effect we want to create. What is the best form that serves the story? By fragmenting our writing, we ask a reader to pause much more frequently than they would in a novel with 3000-word chapters. We are also saying to a reader that each piece is its own thing – it can be read and contemplated on its own terms. That is a powerful idea and creates a very different journey from A to B. A reader might decide to read out of order. They might decide to re-read a piece to find additional layers of meaning.

I said above that N-I-F can be ideal for putting a big story in a small container, and I think there’s a chiming between how we as human beings deal with the big stories and how a N-I-F presents them on the page. For example, the theme of grief (as we have in The Regeneration of Stella Yin) is a weighty theme and often our way of dealing with grief is to tackle it in small chunks. We look back on the person we’ve lost through the gauze of memory (which is another subject that seems well suited to being tackled in this way). Memories are patchwork by nature; we don’t remember the in-between. In The Regeneration of Stella Yin, the passage of time is slightly ambiguous, mimicking the manner of memories; it is only the big moments that have made it to the page. Finally, there is something about this particular N-I-F that feels quite epic, and condensing the epic is another advantage of choosing the N-I-F form. An example that demonstrates this brilliantly is Kipris by Michelle Christophorou where a fifty-year journey covering three generations swells outwards to something much bigger than seems possible within the constraints of just 63 pages.

Tone and form

I usually describe the N-I-F as a patchwork. Each story is a square of fabric and they are stitched together in a way that chimes one story against the next. The order is important. If we consider a patchwork quilt then normally each square is bordered by different colour squares and the ordering of colours is chosen for best effect. The same is true of a N-I-F. There is a vast possibility to explore different tonal shades. We have pieces that are lyrical, pieces that structure around dialogue, hermit crab stories, different perspectives and tones of voice. One of the stories in Homing by Johanna Robinson is called “Waiting” and it creates such a startling effect by fracturing the list of things the characters are waiting for – “news”, “signs”, “symbols”, “boats” – and scattering them across the page. In Weather by Jenny Offill, there are Q&A snippets woven throughout the story. The tone of voice in Weather shifts from dark to light, from lyrical to technical to humour. And Kristen Loesch has made full use of these possibilities in The Regeneration of Stella Yin. In the first four flashes, we have a story-in-imperatives, an interview, an email, and a biography. The tone of the writing is at times beautifully lyrical, leaning into imagery (“It sounds like cats when they flatten themselves against walls […] It sounds like television static, malevolent, crackly”), but other moments are gritty or humorous or mimicking the bureaucratic. On the back of the book, Sara Hills describes the novella as “highly innovative” and a lot of this innovation is in the rich combination of tone and form, pushing the possibilities to the limit.

Time

There is a freedom to play around with time in a novella-in-flash since the in-flash form dispenses with the need for transitions and summary. An individual piece might follow straight on from the previous one or it might jump forwards several years or else move about in a non-linear fashion. There might be a braiding of past and present as we see in The Listening Project by Ali McGrane or there might be a more innovative approach. In The Art of Time in Fiction, Joan Silber reminds us that “the traditional visual metaphor for plot is a triangle, not a circle” but a novella-in-flash is by nature non-traditional and the relationship between plot and time might often be a circle or a spiral or a zigzag. This is the sort of innovation we see in The Regeneration of Stella Yin. We are thrust forwards and backwards in time without clear anchoring. The effect is intentionally unsettling. It mimics the characters’ own sense of disorientation, of their worlds fracturing apart.

Place

Another thing that strikes me when comparing novellas-in-flash is how many of them revolve around a specific place. Perhaps because they are more hemmed in or perhaps because it helps with tying the stories together, so many of them have a sense of place at front and centre of the story. Kipris is as much a story about the island of Cyprus as it is about its characters. In The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, many of the stories loop back to that idea of home and identity rooted in the titular house. Straight Down the Road by Dan Crawley takes us on a road trip and it is a story about family and struggle, but it equally feels as though it is a story about place. Similarly, in The Regeneration of Stella Yin, there is a place right in the centre of the narrative. The protagonist has gone to a facility called Birdless Island where she hopes to gain closure from her past. This is a sci-fi story and the setting is appropriately sci-fi. But with the decision to untether time, it feels important that we have a counterbalance in this strong sense of place.

Character

Of course, a story wouldn’t really be a story without a character or two. And the N-I-F form creates an interesting relationship between story and character. First of all, there’s the possibility of perspective shift. This is sometimes taken to the extreme – for example, Geoff Ryman’s 253 is 253 unique perspectives on the world. Other times, a N-I-F focuses on a smaller cast of characters who all have their moments in the spotlight. A writer can make use of different POVs. In The Listening Project, Ali McGrane uses second person narration to invite a reader to put themselves in the shoes of the main character. In Kipris, Michelle Christophorou varies the POV between first-person and third-person depending on the needs of a particular scene. In The Regeneration of Stella Yin, we see this shifting of perspective right from the start. The opening piece is a story told in imperatives. There are stories in past tense. There are stories in present tense. The perspective is constantly being moved about and this, for me, underpins the story, the unsettling, untethering experience of acute grief.

Language and voice

When I’m pushed to define flash fiction, I usually answer that it is down to language and voice rather than the traditional answer of word count and brevity. Flash fiction, for me, has a feel to it that is different to the sort of writing you tend to see in a longer work. It is challenging to maintain the particular tones associated with flash fiction for more than 1000 words and that’s why this tends to be the upper wordcount limit. However, a N-I-F gives a writer a way of breaking that limit without actually breaking it. In The Regeneration of Stella Yin, there are longer pieces and there are shorter pieces, but every piece feels to me as though it has that rich intensity of flash.

Blurred lines

There are several questions that I’ve intentionally left hanging. Does every piece within a N-I-F need to be a standalone story? What is the maximum permissible word count for any individual piece? Does there need to be a strong narrative arc from beginning to end? A lot is up in the air when it comes to defining what a N-I-F is and isn’t, and I would say we should leave those things up in the air. I could pick books from the past like Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos and The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins and ask whether they might qualify as N-I-F given that they tick many of the points I’ve outlined above. Similarly, I might pick contemporary novels like Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson and Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie and ask whether they should be considered within the N-I-F label, at least in part. But I would say, it doesn’t really matter what label we put on a story. All that matters is whether the chosen form is creating the most evocative effect. The more we hem stories into labels, the more we take away a writer’s natural urge to experiment and explore. That is what Kristen Loesch does so brilliantly in The Regeneration of Stella Yin.

What can we take away?

• Use the fragmentary as a way of mimicking memory, or as an approach for tackling big subjects in smaller chunks. It can also be helpful in condensing the epic.

• Remember the importance of contrast; bringing in different textures and tones.

• Explore the possibilities within a non-linear approach; the difference between plot (how a story is laid out on the page) and story (the one-thing-after-another-thing journey from earliest to latest in “real” time).

• Consider the potential of multiple perspectives or POV to bring a richness to whatever story you are telling – seeing things from different angles.

• Experiment and don’t be constrained by what a label tells you is right or wrong – all that matters is what best serves your story.

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