the weight of stillness, the power of white space

Photo by Filip Kominik on Unsplash

Hello, friends! Today’s post is the free monthly version of this newsletter which goes out all 9.9K of you. I hope you are doing well, holding up, and writing lots amidst all the changes and transitions September brings. What follows is an excerpt from a post from a few years ago, on the anniversary of my mother’s death, in which I was contemplating the loss of her, and the white space her absence created in my life. I have included a writing prompt to help you lean in to stillness, negation, and white space in your flash fiction. Further down, I announce some upcoming workshops and there’s also a special discount just for Art of Flash subscribers for a cool new educational venture called Deep Dive.

Thanks, as always, for your readership and support. It means the world to me. With love & gratitude,

Kathy

From: “Absence, Negation, and White Space: On Loss & Spareness” ~November, 2022

Today friends, I’m very much thinking of absence and negation, and what role they play in crafting powerful stories and memoir. I wonder if some form of loss lives in the white space of all our stories, whether we’re aware of it or not.

Above, I quoted the first line of Han Kang’s quietly aching The White Book. A story told in the sparest of short, beautifully written chapters. I highly recommend it to anyone, but flash writers and readers especially.

Here is the list that followed: Swaddling bands / Newborn gown / Salt / Snow / Ice / Moon / Rice / Waves / Yulan / White bird / “Laughing whitely” / Blank paper / White dog / White hair / Shroud

The pieces culminate in a haunting and profound contemplation, a deeply moving story of family and loss. For the reader there is the sense, always, of what is left out, what has been lost, and what is unspoken.

What can flash writers learn from Kang’s approach? The individual pieces read, many of them, like prose poems, but collectively they form a story. What can you subtract from your work-in-progress? How does negation serve to heighten a sense of loss within the text? When you show the reader what