Compression: Susan Rukeyser
Recipe: Compressed Fiction
Ingredients:
¼ lb. lean story (revised).
Insight.
Courage. Do not over season.
Steps:
- Pat story into usual shape.
- Apply meat press.
- Squeeze. Good. More.
- Observe, oozing from beneath cast iron: Tedious explanation. Bland dialogue. Extraneous detail. Fat.
- Press harder.
- Story may no longer resemble usual shape. That’s good. That’s better.
- Observe, released: What the author didn’t trust the reader to know. (She knows. She brings her own story to this.)
- When the space around and between the meat matters just as much as words, your story is done.
- Serve hot. Swallow. Savor.
Compression: Ginger Hamilton Caudill
“Compressed fiction is artful painting with words. Each brushstroke matters, and builds on every other brushstroke to create a masterpiece.” — Ginger Hamilton Caudill
Compression: David Hernquist
“I choose my words carefully. None could be exchanged. This is concision.” — David Hernquist
Compression: Salena Casha
“Words must contain the meaning of all experience, an explosion of chaos and clarity in concise craft.” — Salena Casha
Compression: S.D. Stewart
“For me, writing is synonymous with compression. I write in part to compress my life into understandable bits. Sometimes the briefest moments hold the most significance, but I might not realize it until years later when it occurs to me to write about them. Other times these moments are merely symbolic. Either way, I think they are worth writing about as a way to process and grow as both a writer and a person. ” — S.D. Stewart
Compression: Elizabeth Witte
“In general I think of compression as an essential element or essential absence, sometimes both at once. I don’t think of the compression as a visual element so much as one of time/space/relation in each word’s transition to the next.” — Elizabeth Witte
Compression: Tara Calaby
“All fiction is, by nature, subject to compression. An author selects pertinent aspects of the whole, so as to hold the readers’ interest and not overwhelm them with detail. Sometimes, however, compression goes beyond the usual writing process, producing pieces that carry meaning in every word. A year becomes a sentence; a paragraph encompasses a lifetime. Compressed fiction suggests and implies. It is about trusting readers and allowing them to read the meaning between an author’s lines.” — Tara Calaby
Compression: Leah Kaminsky
“Compression to me means clarity of mind—whittling out the fat. It means honing in on words that cut. It means exploring my love of words by ridding myself of those I hate. For this reason, flash fiction will always be a space for my most poignant and playful prose. That’s what compression means to me.” — Leah Kaminsky
Compression: Christopher Bundy
“Because stories begin in the middle—a past implied, a present explored,a future as possibility—storytelling is inherently selective. What moments matter the most for this story? But a compressed piece reduces that selection even further, often to a single moment of discovery, a flash of illumination. Yet, the beauty of the compressed piece relies on the belief that a lifetime can be conveyed in that single moment. ” — Christopher Bundy
Compression: Daniel Wilcox
“Compression crunches until it explodes.” — Daniel Wilcox
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Upcoming:
03/23 • Kenneth Pobo
03/30 • Roberta Allen
04/06 • Avril Shakira Villar
04/13 • TBD
04/20 • TBD
04/27 • TBD
05/04 • TBD
05/11 • TBD
05/18 • TBD
05/25 • TBD
06/01 • TBD
06/08 • TBD
06/15 • TBD
06/22 • TBD
06/29 • TBD
07/06 • TBD
07/13 • TBD
07/20 • TBD
07/27 • TBD
08/03 • TBD
08/10 • TBD
08/17 • TBD
08/24 • TBD
08/31 • TBD
09/07 • TBD
09/14 • TBD
09/21 • TBD