Flash! It’s a Great Form to Practice!
What is flash writing and why do authors like to write flash pieces?
It’s quicker to write than a novel or memoir. It’s a challenge to see how much you can say with a short word limit, up 500 to 1500 or under 300 for microfiction (6 words, 50 words, 101 words, 150 words, 250 words–whatever a particular editor or journal is looking for and calls it–microfiction, sudden fiction, flash fiction, flash nonfiction). Writing tight offers dexterity with the language and allows your words to offer surprises and depth you didn’t realize you could reach so concisely.
It pays to do a Google search for venues publishing any of these forms (“venues that publish flash and microfiction” work as keywords) of the short short story. Read the submission guidelines for as many of the venues as you can, while reading the writing they publish. When you find print anthologies of flash, use the “look- inside” feature on Amazon. You will realize that whatever flash is, it is partly defined by the editors of venues seeking to publish it.
So, once you have created what you think is a flash story, it is often fun and beneficial for the writing to see if you can reduce the piece to particular word limits and see which version you like the best. Just because a lot of flash writers and editors say that a piece of flash is not a part of a longer story or novel, many in fact report that they have found flash inside published longer writing or taken pieces that aren’t going anywhere and looked for flash pieces inside of those longer ones.
I often share this link to a flash piece that actually teaches a shortening technique: “Exercise” by Bruce Taylor.
How besides by length do authors define or describe flash? A comprehensive article in The Writer magazine includes stabs at defining the form by its qualities. Editors and practitioners of the form are lyric at times and at other times strictly directive about the craft: “I used to say that the difference between a prose poem and a flash story is that in a flash story something happens. Now I have pared back ‘something happens’ to ‘movement,’” reveals Pamela Painter, author of the flash collection Wouldn’t You Like to Know.
Flash fiction writer Michael Martone believes, “This form, ‘flash,’ wants play. It can’t be categorized. It can’t be taught. It knows not to know.”
For Laura Broom, fiction editor of The Carolina Quarterly, “no time or words wasted in diving into the fictional world. Ideally, this brevity should work in tandem with evocative, deliberate language.”
According to Tara Laskowski, editor of the flash fiction online magazine SmokeLong Quarterly, “It makes the reader feel like the characters are fully formed people with histories and pasts, in a fully formed world that exists beyond the moment we are experiencing…And don’t forget the importance of a title that says: Stop. Come in.”
Anthony Varallo, fiction editor of Crazyhorse, say it this way, “A good flash fiction leads the reader into a world already in full swing – if the story isn’t already underway by the first punctuation mark, forget it – and builds to a moment of change or transformation.”
Tara L. Masih, founding editor of The Best Small Fictions, says that what is deemed as “good flash” changes based on historical and cultural context. “If you asked someone of the O. Henry period what a good flash was, they would have insisted on twist endings. Literary writers have gotten away from the twist in the United States…”
Sue Walker, editor of Negative Capability Journal, describes flash this way: “Flash fiction is the way you fall in love. Someone is sitting at a bar, in a coffee shop, at the corner table in the library. You look up. Eyes meet – and voila. That flash, that momentary gleam in the eye is exciting. It is the promise of what is to come.”
And what is in the way for writers and readers of achieving all of this?
One of the most common mistakes Atticus Review editor Michelle Ross says, “is that the writing just isn’t tight. The sentences are flabby. The writer wastes words on details that are not important to the piece.”
Anthony Varallo of Crazyhorse, doesn’t like stories where authors “spend the first few lines clearing their throat.”
Sue Walker of Negative Capability Journal says, “A story fails when it falls into explanation, into redundancy…A story fails when it tends to preach or become sentimental.
Pleiades co-editor Phong Nguyen says, “In an effort to suggest a wider context, some writers can fall back instead on vagueness and obscurity.”
Randall Brown, author of the flash collection Mad to Live and editor at Matter Press, which specializes in flash, says, “As a reader, I want an ending that takes me somewhere –- that moves beyond where the story began. A description of a moment without significance is unmemorable, however lovely the language may be.”
How to put these insights and descriptions together into a way of thinking about flash that will serve you and your writing. I sum it up this way:
The job of short short stories is to offer movement inside a world at the moment of conflict, big or small. The finished story will seem contained but filled with motion, something like snowflakes inside a snow globe or the bubble inside a level. It’s not going to break the fourth wall to explain itself. It will remain inside its world but set up a quick emotional response in the reader.
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With all of these efforts to define flash how is a writer to start? By just writing and then looking for the flash point, the place that the reader enters a story already underway.
To begin writing a new flash piece, read these stories from Vestal Review, the longest-running flash fiction magazine in the world they write on their website (and while you are there read the venue’s submission guidelines!)
“Behind Curtain Number 3” by Kim Hanneman
“I Don’t Love You Too” by Brett Jackson
These short short stores are all good examples of how the authors run with weird inversions of how we usually think.
What weird situation have you been in that you can use as inspiration for a story? Something that happened when you were babysitting? A metaphor you couldn’t get out of your head when you saw something distressing? A love story that is different than the usual?
Let a good story start happening from whatever reading these stories brings up for you.
Try to find a sentence from the middle of the event and go from there.
When you are done writing, put the work away for some hours, a few days, or longer.
Then look for any throat clearing at the opening, for flabby sentences you can tighten by reducing wors, for places where you became abstract and vague (used summerizing words (like fast forward, flash back, over the years) or words that describe but don’t show feeling (amazing, beautiful, heart felt, deplorable). See if you can reduce your words, even if they aren’t intangible, summarizing words, in the way Bruce Taylor did.
Now, that you’ve been a sculptor do you have a piece of flash? You might not know. Try the story out on a few trusted readers. Hear how they respond–do they get it? Do they feel that something has happened in the story and in them as reader? A poet described this as the writing lifting the reader from where they stand, taking them on a journey and then placing them back down again in the same spot but transformed.
Keep reading flash. Keep attempting it and you’ll find it addictive. Writing tight and vividly and uniquely is always good practice for all of your writing.
Here is a list of venues that I have found in my search. They make for good reading and offer good lists of places to submit your flash stories:
Top 24 Websites for Flash Fiction (Scroll down a ways for his very good list)
Top Ten Literary Magazines To Send Your Best Flash Fiction (and maybe get accepted pt.2)
Flash Fiction: A list of places to submit your work
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Need a boost or some help stepping into the genre? Consider taking my online flash writing workshop that starts next month on March 3. Practice and responses help your writing grow.