Writing influenced
by Amy Hempel

Amy Hempel is the writer that serious flash fiction writers find when they understand that Carver and Hemingway are only the beginning. She has published very little: four collections in four decades, and almost everything she has written is essential. She is the master of grief held at arm’s length. The compressed form. The story that refuses to be about what it appears to be about.

Compression and grief

Hempel’s most famous story, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried,” is about a woman visiting a dying friend. It is also about the impossibility of being present to someone else’s dying when your own survival requires a certain amount of not-seeing. The compression works because the story refuses to be sentimental. It approaches the grief sideways, through factual detail, through the strange facts the narrator uses to hold reality at distance.

This is not evasion. It is accuracy. Grief does not announce itself as grief. It appears as distraction, as inappropriate levity, as the sudden need to remember interesting facts about chimpanzee sign language when your friend is dying. Hempel renders this with a precision that feels almost clinical until you realise how close you are to tears.

The story earns its emotional impact by refusing to pursue it. The reader arrives at feeling through a route the writer appears to be avoiding. This apparent avoidance is the technique. To go directly at grief would be to sentimentalise it. The oblique route is the only honest one.

The oblique approach

Hempel’s technique: never approach the thing directly. Find the thing that is next to the thing, and go there. The emotional centre of the story is surrounded by the story. The reader circles it. The centre becomes present through its absence, through the way everything else in the story orients toward it without naming it.

This requires exceptional technical control. The writer must know exactly where the emotional centre is before deciding not to go there. The oblique approach only works when the writer is certain of the centre. If the writer does not know what the story is actually about, the oblique approach produces vagueness rather than presence.

The test: read your draft and ask where the real subject is. If you cannot identify it, the draft does not yet have one. If you can identify it and you have named it, consider cutting the name. The story that circles its subject draws the reader in. The story that announces its subject leaves nothing for the reader to discover.

Voice and tonal control

Hempel’s voice is cool. It is funny. It reports devastation with the tone of someone describing weather. This tonal control is her most imitable quality and also the hardest to imitate well. The cool tone creates a gap between what is being described and how it is being described, and that gap is where the emotional content lives.

When writers try to copy this and get it wrong, the result feels arch and cold. The tone becomes a defence rather than a technique. The difference is in whether the writer knows what they are being cool about. Hempel always knows. The coolness is a measured distance from something she has understood completely. Distance from confusion is just confusion.

Her sentences are short not because she is following a rule but because the voice she is rendering does not over-explain. The narrator is holding something. The holding is visible in the prose. The spare syntax is the evidence of restraint, and the restraint is the subject.

What Amy Hempel teaches flash fiction writers

The oblique approach. The emotional centre that is never named. The cool voice that creates space for the reader’s feeling. The story that refuses to be sentimental and is therefore more devastating than sentimentality could ever be. These are advanced techniques. They do not work in a first draft. They emerge through revision, through the writer working backwards from the subject, finding the approach that reveals without announcing.

Read these first:

“Hempel taught me that compression is not about removing words. It’s about approaching the true subject from a direction that is not direct. The story circles what it is actually about. The reader feels the centre without ever arriving at it.”

— David, Tumbleweed Words