The Art of Less: Learning from Lydia Davis
I've been reading The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis—a book that sits quietly on the shelf until opened and then doesn’t so much shout as murmur its truths. One story in particular has stayed with me: Happiest Moment. It’s no more than a few sentences long. A sliver of conversation, really. But like the finest poetry or parable, it says far more than its word count would suggest.
One great short story to read today: Lydia Davis’s “Happiest Moment” ‹ Literary Hub
Uniquely her style, stripping away even the possibility of embellishment. like a pebble in the palm: small, cool, weighty.
I've tried writing flash fiction myself. Not often, and not always well. It’s far harder than it looks. To write something short is one thing. But to write something short that lands with meaning, mood, and movement—that’s something else entirely. Davis makes it look effortless, but those of us who write know the labour behind that kind of lightness. There’s no room to hide. No time to explain. You’re forced to decide what matters and what can be let go.
What I admire in Davis is her trust in the reader. She doesn't handhold. She doesn’t decorate. Instead, she pares everything back to the nerve, the heartbeat. Happiest Moment doesn’t unfold like a typical story. It arrives. A moment of clarity between two people. And then it’s gone. But it lingers—like something you've half-heard in a dream and then carry all day without knowing why.
Minimalist writing, when done like this, feels generous. Not sparse. Not cold. There’s warmth in the restraint. Space to breathe. Space to project your own experience into the silence left between the lines. And perhaps that’s why it works so well. It honours the reader. It assumes that we, too, have lived. That we’ve known happiness, and also the ache of not being able to name it.
Reading Davis is a kind of writer’s discipline. It reminds me that what we leave out matters as much as what we put in. That brevity isn’t always a lack—but sometimes a way of distilling truth. I don’t write like Lydia Davis, but I’m learning from her. About form. About trust. About the quiet authority of simplicity.
And about how, sometimes, the most meaningful stories come not in volumes, but in moments.