Flash prose, sometimes called flash literature, is creative writing between 500 and 1500 words. This term includes further subgenres prose poetry, short essays and vignettes.

Like the longer essay, or something now called short memoir, the flash personal essay evokes experience and arrives at discovery through the writer’s telling. Because it is short, it maintains a firm focus with tight writing. There isn’t much backstory needed or exposition (explaining). The images carry the momentum of the essay and move time forward without the writer having to mention it. No “rewind” or “fast forward” transitions that lead to lengthy “filling in” for the reader. Short phrases and words like “later,” “now,” and “soon” do a lot of work in a short space and keep the images and dialog at the forefront. The writer splashes into the story in a particular moment and takes us from there, allowing the dialog and images to catch the reader up and take the reader forward. If there is exposition for set up and reflection it does not dominate the story.

I’ve used the example below from my own writing and the exercises following it in other instructional articles. But I don’t believe I’ve put it all together with the self-editing tips that go a long way when writing short. Whether this is a refresher for you or the first time you’ve read this work as a model for generating a meaningful personal essay, I hope you are inspired to write many short personal essays of your own.

Here’s an example from my work (1,062 words):

How Right

So we beat on, boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly into the past.

                                                –F. Scott Fitzgerald said

I was 18 and lonely at Laurel Lake Camp in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, where I was a bunk counselor for 10-year-olds. My steady boyfriend of two years was traveling in Europe, his debate team’s prize for winning our state’s championship.

One night, I sat on the bleachers of the social hall reading Scientific American, preparing for the biology major I thought of pursuing. Another counselor, impressed with this reading material, approached me–petite like I was, French, a recent graduate in Engineering at Columbia, and the camp’s tennis pro. Soon my lonely summer turned into something wonderful–lying in each other’s arms evenings by the lake under the moon in the moist grass, whispering, “Je t’aime. Je t’aime.”

Days off we headed for the Delaware River and spent our afternoons swimming and sunning. Evenings off, we crossed state lines to dance in New York state, where the drinking age was 18. When my bunk of girls went on its several-day canoe trip, he was one of two male counselors assigned to guide and protect us. He and I lay chastely in our sleeping bags under the stars.

He was leaving after camp for Paris where he would be a graduate student and play semi-professional soccer. I was to be a freshman at the University of Wisconsin.

“Marry me and come to France with me. You can learn the language and then go to the Sorbonne. I have never felt like this before. We need to be together.” I didn’t have the courage to announce to my family that I was leaving; perhaps I feared the task of learning proficient French.

On the morning of our departure from camp, the buses lined up. His was bound for Manhattan and mine for New Jersey suburbs. We stood together as long as we could until boarding was imperative.

We met for a date in Manhattan. After a French lunch where the waitress called me Madam (his wife), we saw the film “A Man and A Woman”–true and unrequited love–and then dinner and a disco–my heart was light as a heart feels in its proper place. Still, I could not get the courage to redirect my energies away from the college education my parents wanted me to begin and my expected return to a high school sweetheart.

He called me on my wedding day three years later. I cried at the delight of hearing his voice; how always right we felt with each other.

A year later, he was in New York briefly. I went to visit him. There was nothing I felt more truly, sitting in a room with him, than the desire to be with him and to leave the life I had taken on from my own lack of courage. Still a coward, I came home, and in my fear, ripped up every address–there were three–I had for him, as if my desire could be shredded.

Nine years later, I divorced. I wrote a poem one February morning while sitting by my new window watching water bead on the branches of two Japanese maples:

In February

Today the cherry tree is grey
as fossil. On its bare boughs
raindrops are winter pearls.

Yesterday a brief change in the weather.|
High in the branches a robin,
the fat warrior of spring,
held its breast to the early sun.

Suppose when my letter reaches you,
I have fallen from your memory
like ripe fruit. That would be
most perfect, to remain the pull
of something finished.

Or perhaps my name still slips
to your tongue as words
sometimes slip. For cabbages and sunlight,
you’d say my name, for canoe, laurel,
minnow and finch. The wind is old
and carries many words.

I loved you. I loved you.

I tried to find my lost love by sending postcards in French to the 60 or so people I could find by his last name in directories for both his hometown and Paris, where I thought he must stayed. No one who answered me knew him.

When my daughter was 15, she decided to go to France to spend her junior year of high abroad. Just before she left, she asked if I had ever found “that guy from France.” She asked where I’d seen him last. “New York.” I suddenly remembered visiting New York where he had stayed in an apartment his mother kept. I had buried the details of that last encounter more successfully than I knew. Within the week, my daughter brought me addresses from directories at our city’s library for everyone in Manhattan by his last name. Several months later, I had cleared my desk and saw the list. Why not? I mailed 11 letters in English.

Early fall. My daughter was housed with a host family in southeast France. The leaves outside my window were turning, our mornings crisp and bright. The phone rang early.

“I hear you are looking for me.”

For three hours, we spoke about the intervening years. We felt happy, so strong was our connection to the sounds of fish jumping and paddles in the river, the smell of wooden cabins surrounded by trees. He’d married 10 years before, which meant when I sent out my original letters, he was a single man! Why had I not thought to send a letter to Manhattan? I told him about my poem and my letters and my complete lack of courage to be myself and have what I wanted.

Later that day, I went to rent “A Man and A Woman” and found that there was “A Man and A Woman Twenty Years Later.” Same actors, only this time their love is requited. I watched and I cried and cried.

Years after writing that first poem, I was back on the Atlantic seaboard where we had first met. On the beach, I felt the loss again and wrote:

I Brought My Tears to the Sea

Beyond the beach’s white thighs and the waves’
swell of desire, there was moonlight on calm water.|
It made part of the ocean shine like armor
or the metal door to a vault.

How could I bury my heart?

On the beach in morning, wind ruffled
the wings of a kite and I knew memory was silk,
moonlight, a robe I would wear never to forget you.

And I have not.

****

Notice the words I use at the opening of paragraphs to keep the chronology that narrative requires going, and check the comments I make such as “we felt happy” and “feeling the loss again.” Notice that there are far more images that appeal to the senses than comments, and when I do include comments they move the story forward in time because they are short, direct reports that happened during the actual time of the story I am telling.

Even though the essay is short, I found room to include my younger and older selves’ feelings and show, that even after many years, Jacques remained a man who lived in my heart long after we’d said goodbye. There is an irony in finding Jacques with only 11 letters and through my teenaged daughter’s persistence when I had failed before, but more than that, the essay brings a reliving and reawakening of the sadness I carried with me of not following my heart. Still, the essay allowed me to come alive to that love and treasure it though I was remarried and Jacques had married about the same time as when I had been writing those postcards to find him.

How to Write the Short (Flash Nonfiction) Narration Essay

If you have a story in mind you are all set for the next writing step. If you don’t yet have that story in mind, continue to look into your journal entry and jot down objects, people (and pets), and opportunities you have lost or found.

When you feel a physical “Aha, that’s one that feels like it needs telling” sensation, make that the story you will use. If nothing grabs you, choose from your jottings and use whatever you choose for the next exercises. You may be very surprised about how far you can get in your writing even when you don’t really think you are onto something.

Now one way or another, you have a story to tell whether it is about losing money your parents had given you or being with a dying relative or friend or pet. You might have thought of a time you lost a part in a play or remembered finding a precious object or a new friend or an unexpected chance to travel.

Next, ask, “What do I remember about that losing or finding ?” Or ask it this way, “What times do I remember about losing and finding while __________(perhaps, for example, getting divorced, becoming a parent, adjusting to an illness, fighting a war, or visiting another country)?”

Free associate to images and events that go with the memories and write those images down. Think of more details to go with each memory, and jot those down, too, and you’ll find that more details come to you. Stay specific; include images that tell how things looked, felt to the touch, smelled, tasted and sounded.

Next, recount events that led up to the loss or gain in the order they happened.

Take your jottings and listings and make one long list of lines that include them but each start this way: This is a story about… . As you write your “this is a story about” compilation, you will probably think of more details and add those in in their own lines. Avoid writing with abstractions such as “This is a story about love. This is a story about being accepted. This is a story about finally having friends.” Instead, write lines like this:

This is a story about wearing too-short-for-me grass-stained pants to school. This is a story about sitting alone in the cafeteria, gobbling a small mound of spaghetti and red sauce from a beige plastic plate on my tray. This is a story about hoping no one would throw their chewed gum onto my plate as they walked by. This is the story of a small dog with no tag that followed me home. This is the story of ….

Try another listing exercise. Write “Things that Happened When I Lost/Found _{__________________} ” at the top of a file or page and make as long of a list of things that happened as you can.

Try it again this way entitling it, “Things That I Didn’t Do When I Lost/ Found ____________.” You will come up with details that allow you to see how different the time you are writing about was from other times.

Finally, if you haven’t, go back into the three lists and insert what you remember saying, being told, overhearing or listening to on the radio or television. Dialog and direct speech are sound images and very valuable to your writing.

How This Essay Style Uses Description and Time to Answer a Life Question

Look at the three lists-writes you did. You should have a lot of images from which to begin writing. Those will be essential to describing locations, people and yourself as you write your narration personal essay answering the question “When have I lost or gained someone, some thing or some opportunity?”

You are ready to try your hand at drafting your narration essay. You might want to start your story with a sentence like, “This is a story about the time I . . . ” or “Usually things went like_____________ for me, but this time something else happened.” Or you might start with a description of where you were standing just before the loss or the find. Even when your essay is not fully developed, you can feel where you are entering interesting territory by the rise in the level of your attention and the flood of details returning to you. Trust this.

Write from what seems to be the tightest beginning of the story to what seems to be an end that grows from the story’s moments and isn’t imposed on those moments.

Put the draft away for at least a few hours or even a few days. Come back to it with fresh eyes. Comb through your words and ask these questions:

Where have I put in too many details? Choose the strongest ones.

Where have I left details out and instead used summarizing words that tell rather than show? Put more detail in those places.

Where have I included unnecessary information—information that doesn’t move the story forward but digresses or repeats something already shown? Take it out.

Do I use too many words to keep the reader clear about time moving along? Shorten those phrases.

Do the images from one paragraph to the next already show time has passed? For instance, if you want to let readers know it is the next day, you might show it this way, “The sun rose above a layer of grey clouds.” Readers will know it is now morning. If you have to move the reader along to another part of the day, all that might be needed is a sentence like, “By the time I reached the office, the clouds had won the fight.”

When you use images you convey feeling. In the two sentences I used above to move time along, I’ve set the stage with the cloud images for something ominous or at least disappointing to happen.

****

Let us know how this exercise works for you from beginning to end—my hope is that you will identify a time and event you are interested in exploring and bring feeling and discovery to the page, whether that is a remembered sadness or an insight into why you did or didn’t take the opportunity life presented. It is likely that your writing will contain, if even lightly, an organically discovered catching up to the now of your life.