The flash sequence uses poetic leaps of association for examining the impact of difficult-to-articulate circumstances. Sometimes it is accomplished in journal entries, other times with meditations about place, or people or objects. Sometimes it is composed of collections of scenes. Whatever the container of the sequence, the form is undoubtedly a psychological exploration, often of loss, powerlessness, or vulnerability.

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I believe that the flash sequence form is an adaptation in prose of something poets have done for a long while.

Night after night after my divorce, in my early days of writing poetry, I lay alone in bed looking at my desk under a newly installed skylight. Although money was tight, I had paid for the installation of the skylight under the eaves of the 1913 structure as well as for the removal of a wall and a door so I could write there. I worried about the new chapter in my life, the benefit of which was sometimes hard to hold onto. I began to write snippets of thoughts. They became a poem:

Under the New Skylight

Not long ago it was a closet,
one narrow door in, no light,
the stale unmoving air.

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To decide to give up your dream
is to walk in
among the stationary.

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We only think we’re different
than a shirt. The dreams choose us.
If we fit right and breathe,
they carry us for the ride.

Thinking about what we hang in a closet, suddenly I knew that I was not the center of my dreams so much as a passenger on them. Dreams have power and I would thrive by fitting onto my dreams rather than by forcing them to fit an idea of me. There was something comforting about that. By choosing segments from my thoughts and separating them by asterisks, I felt a flow going from my yearnings to a fear of tottering on the brink of failure. I moved from questioning my decision to divorce to a lived experience of “let go and let God.”

Now prose writers are experimenting more and more with using the technique of segments to build an emotional journey. In Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence, editor Nickole Brown reports that her editorial committee for this volume defines the flash sequence as an “accumulation, not series; pieces and segments, not prose poems or flash prose.”

The contributors to the anthology sent in linked prose poems, narrative sequences, and lyrical essays, and many surprises in between, such as groupings of koans and fairy tales and epistolary addresses.  Brown advises the book’s readers to see the collection of flash sequences as “testament to the simple pleasures of continuity, of seeing what comes before and what comes after, fulfilling that basic human urge to answer the question, What next?”

As a writer, you are a singular consciousness filtering the world before you. You are an explorer of the inner responses to what you’ve filtered. But first you need to record these inner experiences as evocatively and “unjudged” as possible.

Writing in flash or poetic fragments allows the writer to pull words and phrases, from memory and from the present, out of what might seem like thin air, but is really the subconscious. That part of us is always present, but in writing usually needs an invitation to come forward. Being able to skip over white space is very much to the liking of the subconscious. Images and the music of words communicate inner experience by projecting out onto the world before our eyes, ears, tongues, fingers and noses. When you are writing because a mood has taken over you, the words choose you, as I said of dreams, and have a way of guiding you toward meaning.

When a writer finishes segmented sequences, answers are felt from what has been mulled over in the segments. From what comes next and next again, the unconscious fulfills meaning more deeply than we could have if we set out to follow a straight path. The paths toward insight are rarely straight. They meander, collecting images until those found images team to create a path that no one knew was there.

An Exercise in Writing the Flash Sequence
Imagine a series of postcards as a container to help you ease into creating by accumulation.

Just as in the letter form of writing a personal essay, the postcard sequence takes advantage of the idea that when we direct our words to another person, living or dead, someone who knows or knew us or someone we’ve admired or disliked but never met, we tap into writing that we may not have found if we weren’t addressing it to someone upon some occasion.

You are the author, and you can decide to whom you are writing. Is it to a person living or dead, someone you know or knew or never met but have read or listened to or watched? Your recipient can also be nameless—someone at a bus stop, for instance, or the barista who makes your coffee or the boy doing a jigsaw puzzle on the ferry.

The recipient doesn’t even have to be a person—it can be the curb in front of your house, a pair of your shoes, the deer that visits your yard or gave birth there in May. It can be a season or meal. And the sequence doesn’t even have to be of postcards written to the same recipient—a variety of recipients can make an intriguing and compelling flash sequence.

I remember one student, Liz Gamberg, and her flash sequence. It was made of postcard messages to a variety of recipients and began “Dear Janet.” This first in her series of postcard messages was written as a postscript to a phone conversation the two had had. The message ends with this question:

Did you ever notice how close
in spelling the words “sacred” and “scared” are?

The second postcard in the series begins, “Dear Anne Lamott” and was written after hearing her speak. The message recounts highlights of the address and ends:

How alive am I willing to be, you asked all of us?
I am not sure.

But thanks for looking into the abyss and writing about it.

The third postcard begins “Dear Liza,” another friend. This time the postcard is a message thanking the friend for her companionship at dinner when the author of the sequence was very anxious about her work. It ends with gratitude:

And thank you for telling me that when you’re intimidated by someone,
you just imagine them in their underwear.

A fourth and final postcard opens, “Dear morning.” One of the things Gamberg describes to morning is seeing the red and yellow flag by the Buddhist temple a few blocks away barely waving in the breeze. Her postcard message ends with a description that yields a philosophy:

I watch it through spaces in the slats of the blinds
which separates everything into separate frames.

You realize that this speaker is working to find a way forward, to find a way to adjust to a world that doesn’t seem tranquil.

A Flash Sequence Writing Exercise

• Gather 3 to 7 postcards from stores or merchants or booksellers, free or purchased.
• Decide to whom will you address the first message. Whoever comes to mind will work well.
• What do you most want to tell the recipient right now from the place you are writing? Include images of where the postcard implies you have been. A way to begin the postcard message might be with this challenge: collect Chinese fortunes, randomly select one and begin the postcard message with that sentence. Mixing up the logical brain helps the image-making, associative brain join the party.
• Continue writing two or three or more postcard messages to the same or different recipients. If you use the fortune cookie idea, keep selecting fortunes randomly to write as sentences that start the messages.
• Put the sequence you have created away for a few hours or days or even weeks.
• When you come back to read it, you will begin to see that in your messages, the unconscious was choosing a focus for the recipient(s) that was part of a search to help you find out what was at the bottom of your heart and mind concerning an emotional quandary. You may want to trim the messages so they speak more powerfully through the images you included. You may also want to rearrange their order if it seems right for the flow.

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For further reading, try the sequences published in Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence. Another book I have admired, In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing, is also worth a read.

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Take-aways:

• Writing in accumulated flash or accumulated fragments is a way to jump over white space in creative nonfiction.
• Writing flash sequence allows the writer to involve the unconscious in meaning- making without at first knowing how deeply the unconscious is at work.
• The segments themselves do the emotional work that builds from one segment to the next.
• The writer doesn’t have to indicate out how the thoughts and emotions evoked travel through space and time or why they have come up and onto the page.
• The not-knowing aspect of where writing might go is shared between the writer and the reader, as both seem to journey together in constructing meaning.
• If you quiet the part of yourself that wants to pin things down and instead find a container that helps you linger on a quandary or mood, not by writing about it directly, but by incorporating your doings, conversations, and private philosophical thoughts, you will experience the power of the flash sequence.