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Too many flashes I read these days (and even before these days) feel to me as if the driving force behind them is that the writer wanted to write a flash. Often characters' desires drive narratives into being (so the craft books tell us), but less is written about the writer's desire and its effect on the narrative. The desire "I want to write a flash" creates flash that often feels "written" rather than experienced, that feels fixed rather than moving.Too often these flashes leave me thinking "So what?" rather than "Yowza!"

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The desire "I want to figure something out" creates a different kind of flash. I find myself, more and more, writing flash out of my own wanting to discover something (in the world, a character, my self, someone I know, wanted to know, those kind of things) and writing toward that thing (but being unsure of how to get there or what I'll discover). All that writing that I've done before allows me (perhaps) to think less about craft/the writing itself (what I know) and more about something revelatory (what I don't know).Of course, part of the discovery process is sometimes coming across a new craft/writing "thing" that takes me by surprise and sometimes I write conscious of some challenge I've set up for myself (no dialogue, 200 words exactly, a juxtaposition of two parallel stories, and so on).

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The traditional way stories figure out things is to initiate a character into some high-stakes action to satisfy that now active desire, a desire that is thwarted (again and again and again) until there's some kind of resolution to the wanting that has become action. In other words, the writer figures something out through identification with a character who is in the process of figuring out something of importance, and that is the same way (perhaps) Reader figures things out, too. The revelation at the end belongs to POV character, Reader, and Writer. They might all hug and sing Kumbaya at the end.

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There's something more desperate and urgent in flash, something that sets itself against the way longer stories draw things out. There's something that needs to be figured out freakin' now. In flash, it feels particularly important for the writer to be dying for answers than desperate to have written.

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The point is this, methinks. Try writing flash as therapy (not for Reader or Character but) for yourself, to figure something out that needs to be figured out. It doesn't require the traditional form of thwarted action, thwarted action, thwarted action, resolution. It needs something else, something only compression, brevity, and your own urgent need to know can give it. Do it now. Before the desire wanes into quiescence and the ho-hum of the everyday. Go, dawg, go.