Writing flash fiction is a zap moment, a richness dark and light and sweet and bitter, and squirted from a needle fine and releasing it seems to me, the lightening of Zen.
Mostly I tread through a blankness of glued tumbleweed gripped by a swerving and a swaying and a yawing dune, at the whim of some insouciant purpose. Mostly divulging nothing. The scrubby, spherical brush is dry as mechanics. Mostly I fucking struggle. It irks me that I want to be creative and have no ideas. Why is no ideas? I’m not a charlatan. I’m not a fantasist. I’m not a fake, a pretender, a wannabe trying to be a writer. I don’t even call myself a writer. My friend will tell you that.
But sometimes the digging up does produce a nugget and I dunno, something forms. Then it re-reaches into the sand and without fanfare but instead bare-faced elan, whips into words instantly plummeting across my mind, not dead weeds, but a string of spinning jewels, a thread of corundum sapphires, a marvel garnering the palm of the page. I go, ‘What? Where the fuck did that come from?’
Then trying to write isn’t trying. It’s a flash, a zap, a joy.
(image by Jacek Dylag on Unsplash)
