At Lit in One Sentence, we focus on the magical trifecta of character-journey-stakes because these three elements set the overall emotional vibe of any unit of story. Whether it’s a 100-word microfiction or a 6-season streaming series, a whole book or a single scene or sentence, these three elements need to be there and working well together for a story to cohere.
Lately I’ve been noticing — both in my own work and the submissions queue — that when something is almost working but still not quite landing, the problem is almost always at the level of stakes.
It’s easier to nail whose head we’re in and what they’re doing than why, precisely, it matters within the world of the story that they do this thing. Yet this why is make-or-break for the story’s overall emotional vibes and how audiences will feel when they experience it.
So this week, let’s look at a sweet, kinky 700-word flash fiction piece that absolutely gets it right — “Lint” by Nathan Alling Long. It’ll take about five minutes to read, if you want to do that first.
The Emotional Superstructure of “Lint”
A lover must coat themself in dryer lint to have the best sex with their partner, shedding the life detritus built up between them and feeling again what lies underneath.
How to Make a Kink Sublime
This story’s central image is a naked masculine person in a painter’s mask, covered in layers of soft pink-grey dryer lint.
In the hands of a less skilled writer, this could easily land as just comical or weird, which is unlikely to lift a story out of the submissions queue.