For the past month, I have been teaching an online class in writing in the flash subgenre. Last Saturday, I taught an all-day in-person seminar on the genre. So, this week, I am sharing some of my lesson ideas and links to model flash pieces, which I hope will encourage you to try your hand at the genre. I will be offering another section (all new exercises) online beginning 11/7 and going through 12/7 (if needed, we can add an extra week if people need time because of Thanksgiving).

What is flash? It’s prose (or prose poetry) that gives readers a quick, vibrant snapshot of a dramatic situation or meditation in compressed, surprising language. The word count is anywhere from 6 to 25 to 50 to 69 to 101 to 250 to 500 to 1000 to 1500 depending on various publications’ editors and what they are asking for in submissions. You’ll figure out the genre by reading the many samples I’ve selected for you here, and, I hope, find yourself writing your own flash.

Here are four lessons inspired by the work to which I’ve provided links followed by a list of my favorite online flash publications.

I?d love to work with you in my online flash class beginning November 7!

Lesson 1 Model and Ideas

I discovered Sarah Russell’s flash writing through the anthology,?Flash Fiction Funny, which included her flash piece, “Mother’s Last Wishes.”

On her website, I read more of her writing. I admire this flash piece very much: “Figure Drawing at Community College.”

I couldn?t help but create some lessons for my current flash class with writing ideas inspired by Russell?s work:

1. Compose a letter to someone you know and are close to who you still think about though you haven’t seen him or her in years. Or choose to write to a favorite pet or object. What might you say that would surprise that recipient? Now, write their letter back to you with more surprising information. Remember this is flash writing. Word lengths of 250, 500, or 1000?are in the ballpark. The two letters do not have to be the same word length.
2. Write a flash piece in which you are writing about a life event and composing a limerick about that event. You might do that as a letter to someone who would be surprised by what you are saying or by the recipient who might be. Most of all have fun–you might start from a life event but can certainly exaggerate if you want.

Lesson 2 Model and Ideas

?At the end of an interview New Flash Fiction editor Tom Dean had with prolific flash writer Stuart Dybek, Dybek says:

I?ll end by returning to my piece ?Initiation.?? I wanted it to be able to stand on its own.? As an individual piece one of the things I was after was trying to capture how the incredible speed of violent action has a paralyzing effect but then how that moment along with the feeling that one might have done more at the time goes on and on haunting the mind long after the moment is past?the pathetic outcry of the 1^st?person narrator uttered only once in the piece, but how many more times in memory?? That piece is also part of a sequence.? I grew up in Chicago and spent a good part of my life riding the el, and one of the things I continue to work on is a sequence of little actual flashes as the train goes through the dark tunnel and stops briefly at lighted stations and then barrels off again into the dark.

I really enjoy his metaphor about flash being like brief stops at lighted stations before your train barrels off again into the dark. Here is a link to his flash piece “Initiation,” which he set on a ride on the El in Chicago. After you’ve read his piece, consider the first sentence and how lengthy it is as it gets us into the story addressing who, what, what and how. The sentence that gets us out of the story is even longer. The sentences in the middle of the story are shorter. For me, the long opening and ending sentences are like the train when it is moving between stops and the middle is all about a stop in time–the memory of the event the narrator witnessed. And in the form of flash, this event stays in the memory of the reader, too.

Dybek says in the interview that he?d put the piece ?Initiation? “in the category of the Hemingway vignette in which brevity, clarity, understatement, and?tone are essential to produce what Poe called an ‘effect.'”

Here are the ideas Dybek?s writing inspired for me. Try your hand at writing from the ideas below–each of the pieces no more than 350 to 400 words:

1. What moment in time have you or a character you have invented witnessed in which something disturbing happened that no one could control and as if bookended like this event–one purse pulled away from a passenger at the beginning and then many purses swinging on the arms of the high-fiving thieves.
2. Have you witnessed an accident, a terrible argument, disruptive behavior, endured a painful medical or dental procedure, or had experienced a sudden moment of great joy that you could write about as if it is a spot of light between stations? What images and rhythm will you use to start into the moment? And which to end the moment of the event your flash piece is about?

Lesson 3 Models and Ideas

Here?s another challenge if you’d like to write more flash:

Author Pamela Painter is?interviewed in?New Flash Fiction?as well. You might enjoy adding her take on writing flash to Dybek’s and the one you are probably formulating by now.

In the interview, she tells and shows how she writes flash, a process in which she doesn’t know where the words will take her: “A novel, a micro, and a poem go into a bar together” she begins as an example of something that occurs to her for starting a flash piece. Then she decides to show her process, saying, “I?ll start a story with that line and see where it takes me.”? And off she goes:

?

Bar Talk

A novel, a micro, and a poem go into a bar together. Considering itself of a higher order, the poem speaks first.? ?So, where is story??? Both the novel and the micro insist on ordering drinks before they even address this question. Scotch for the novel; bourbon for the micro, both straight-up.? And the poem?? Belatedly, the poem approves, then displays its tendency for precise images by ordering a martini: Tanqueray Gin, three pitted olives, shaken four times with three ice cubes and served in a frosted martini glass. Soon the novel, the micro and the poem toast this fine occasion. Then the poem, playing host, rephrases the earlier question: ?Did anyone invite the story?? Though it?s not like we need a fourth for bridge or two?folies a deux.?? ??The story?s too short,? the novel says.? ?Too long,? the micro says.? The poem is astonished at such mundane reasons and says ??length??is that all that?s keeping the story from our little party?? The novel and the micro admit it?s true.? They call for a new round.? Delighted with another martini, the poem realizes that four at the table would have meant an even larger bar tab.? And poems, as we know, are rarely able to pay the bill.? So the novel picks it up; the micro leaves the tip.

Your Turn: Make up a title for a flash story that is a play on something we know as the start of many jokes and let yourself spin a flash piece of writing.

Another of Painter’s published stories mentioned in the interview is “Letting Go.“?What I admire about the story is not only the quirky action and odd ending but the use of detail:

…this couple in their multipocket hiking shorts and sturdy Clarks. I let my Nikon dangle from the beaded lanyard round my neck, and take their fancy smartphone, heeding their instructions.

The story set up tells us the speaker has an ex and she uses that to help her employ a clich?. “You were always a good listener,? she quotes the ex, ?but sometimes you have to let things go.?

We’ve all heard the advice “Let it go.” How many of us have built an ironic story around them?

What common statement have?you remembered in a place and time far from when you heard it the first time? What in the situation caused it to come back to you? Is there irony in that moment that you can build a flash story around?

Lesson 4 Models and Ideas

Read Bruce Taylor’s flash piece in three parts called “Exercise.”

Choose a situation to write about in 250 to 500 words. Then take his advice and write a version in half that number of words. And then half again.

Put the word count at the top of each of the sections as he did.

Call your piece “Exercise” and attribute the idea to Taylor by writing these words under the title, “After Bruce Taylor’s story “Exercise.”

I think this writing task will lead to something worthwhile for both you the writer and your readers. Each of Taylor’s pieces have their virtues and when you get to the end and reread his instructions at the start of his piece, there is a heightened emotional response to his performance of the exercise. This will happen in your work too.

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Now you know about several online sites to find flash. Type “flash nonfiction” or “flash fiction” (you can publish nonfiction as fiction but not the other way around) into your browser and you will find so many more to send your work out to. Flash is fun to read, to write and to publish.

Here are a few more of my favorites:

101words.org https://101words.org/

Brevity Magazine http://brevitymag.com/

Flash Fiction Online http://flashfictiononline.com/main/

Flash Fiction Magazine https://flashfictionmagazine.com/

True Stories Well Told https://truestorieswelltold.com/

iStories in Narrative Magazine https://www.narrativemagazine.com/node/81331