Flash! Fiction 3 by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

4

The Writer Who Had to Write Big

Some writers write about the small, the everyday, the ordinary, and, turning it over and over and looking at it from all sides, the good ones turn up something never before seen in precisely that light.

Christopher couldn't tolerate the banal, however artistically finessed. He had to have the big theme, larger than life, steeped in history and suggestive of the future.

He should have been a novelist, but he was afflicted with a genius that grew bored very, very quickly. So, he wrote flash fiction  fleet-ing bursts of the imagination compressed into a short story that can be fully digested in 3-5 minutes.

His friends were polite but curious when they asked how he could write about epic themes in only slightly more detail than haiku. Of course, they never asked him directly. They always asked one another, rhetorically.

From an early age, Christopher was fascinated by the transcend-ing. That's the one thing that he enjoyed so much about his religious lessons as a young boy. Religion introduced him to the infinite, and this liberated him from the common and the boring repetition of things and people and places.

Gaining entry was difficult and inexplicable. However, it was impossible for Christopher to navigate through the infinite. He simply yielded to the infinite. Although it was blasphemous, some even maintained that no one had ever mastered the infinite. But that was a large part of the attraction for Christopher—an infinite that got larger the farther you got into it.