FlashFiction.Net

When it comes to words, she’s a bookworm, brain, geek, nerd, poindexter, specialist, guru, and a bunch of other synonyms. And she has a major crush on Peter Mark Roget. And you will, too, after reading her article. (continue reading)

I think flash will always have such challenges attached to it, the challenge of compressed narrative and the challenge of narrative-alternatives. (continue reading)

Mary Tabor answers questions about her flash memoir, (RE) MAKING LOVE: A SEX AFTER SIXTY STORY. (continue reading)

Try using hyperbaton and other such devices to get your flashes to be even more flashy. (continue reading)

With her talent and wisdom, Kim Chinquee is able to dangerously flirt with both poetry and fiction, and create provocative art. Her newest book Pretty is no exception. (continue reading)

So that’s today’s flash focus. Imagine your character is “Master” and he/she runs into something that is “Bates.” (continue reading)

This entry was a response to the question, “How do you decide when you have an idea, if it is going to be flash length or longer?” from the AWP Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Flash Fiction Panel. (continue reading)

FlashFiction.Net concludes the unofficial Steve Almond month with a flash from his collection of mini-essays and short shorts—This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey. (continue reading)

Must a prose writer love the sentence the way a poet, say, loves the line? (continue reading)

In BUT THIS WON’T TAKE BUT A MINUTE, HONEY, Almond gives us essentially two chapbooks in one, a book of thirty flash fiction stories and a book of thirty essays on writing. I can imagine that one’s experience of the book could vary considerably depending simply on which side one reads first. (continue reading)

At the start of this year, I won an auction to support the literary journal Hunger Mountain that gave me the opportunity to send a manuscript to Steve Almond for critique. I sent him a flash piece I’d been working on—and what I got in return was some generous praise and suggestions. I recently emailed him and, being the all-around cool guy that he is, he gave me permission to reprint his comments and advice here. (continue reading)

I’ve long been a fan of Chuck Norris facts, a site devoted to telling the world about the unworldy bad-assness of Mr. Norris. Here’s a list of 9 facts I “borrowed” from their site, to help you embrace the fearless face of flash. (continue reading)

A listing of some recent first lines to inspire one’s own. (continue reading)

Flash will always be about a word count (usually under 1000 words), but that doesn’t quite answer the question, because not everything written under 1000 word would be considered flash fiction. Of course, its tininess defines it, but again, I think it’s the mindset of the writer, when faced with the challenge of tininess, that makes fiction flash. Below are nine (9) tiny things that answer “What is flash fiction?” from the perspective, not of the piece itself, but of its author. (continue reading)

Matt Bell’s How the Broken Lead the Blind seems deceptively simple at first, consisting of 55 pages, with only ten stories, of length ranging from a sparse page and a quarter to nearly seven pages in length. The ten stories, though, are carefully arranged, their trajectories minutely adjusted and sent to spin and crash together with a precision that would seem cold if it didn’t have beneath it a true concern for the human condition. (continue reading)

Rob Parnell’s article “Writing An Act of Magic” begins, “You have thoughts. You write them down as words. Later, others read them and your thoughts become theirs. Spooky, eh? I’m sure it was once, when the Druids roamed prehistoric Europe, exchanging information in the form of archaic symbols.” (continue reading)

That is the flash fiction question for today. If you go against expectation, how do you make it clear to readers that they are to read it differently, that you are aware of the expectation they bring to your piece and you are aware of how that expectation might lead them away from the “point” of your piece? (continue reading)

There’s a lot to love here in Meg’s comment, but I’m especially drawn to this comment: “Words like sneaker, wave, behind, and slide. These words are flexible—spontaneous, sly, and delicious if you allow them to be!” The flash fiction writer uses words for the seduction, more so perhaps than plotting, and they might be akin to Seinfeld’s special bedroom move, the clockwise swirl. (continue reading)

Now imagine “Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing” as flash. Well, you don’t have to imagine it. I transformed it into flash below (continue reading)

Brandi Wells has writing forthcoming from McSweeney’s, Improbable Object, Apt, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Bust down the door and eat all the chickens. She has a chapbook forthcoming as part the chapbook collective Fox Force 5, which is being released by Paper Hero Press. She blogs at http://brandiwells.blogspot.com/ . (continue reading)

I’ve just finished reading Stefanie Freele’s Feeding Strays for the second time, and I’ve got hundreds of things to talk about, but what’s on my mind now is this: her beginnings astound me. (continue reading)

While reading The Underneath by Kathi Appelt I was struck not only by the incredible writing —one reason you should read her book—but as I read chapter after chapter, I began to realize each one was in of itself a piece of flash fiction. I had the great pleasure of interviewing her, and I asked her about The Underneath, her use of the short chapter structure, as well as a few other questions. (continue reading)

In reading a novel, I find myself picking out the essential words or images that lead to meaning, like the images of daisies, eggs, eyes, in-carnations in Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. Or maybe it’s the men Dorothy finds in Oz I direct my attention to. She is surrounded by them, even Toto, all but the Witch and Glinda. In reading Kim Chinquee’s work, nothing can be ignored, and even the tiniest pattern, the tiniest deviation matters in large ways. (continue reading)

I found this essay written during my MFA. I think it was written at a time when I began to think of each sentence as its own story. That thought process came while reading Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Maybe it’s interesting. Maybe not. (continue reading)

If you are like me (and for your sake I hope that’s not the case), then you tire of the discussions about the lines that divide the prose poem and the flash, and you could, in the end, care less about why someone breaks lines or doesn’t, why singular paragraphs tend to be called prose poems, and the more paragraphs one creates, the more likely one is writing flash. All you know is that breaking your lines creates something not very good. (continue reading)

Yes, I continue the obsession with tragedy in this Tuesday’s Flash Focus, beginning with Louis Ruprecht’s neat summary of the two primary conflicts that emerge from Hegelian tragedy: (1) “the self comes into conflict with the social and political powers that be”; and (2) the individual comes into conflict with “Destiny, the gods, and the will of the world” (42). (continue reading)

Kathy Fish’s “Wren”—a featured story in FRiGG —utilizes the encounter between healthy and unhealthy to reveal truths about both such states of existence. (continue reading)

This fresh-out-of-the-shop feature of FlashFiction.Net asks a writer of a piece to interview one of its readers. Here, Joseph Young interviews Michael Kimball about his (short) short “Eleven.” (continue reading)

In short, the short short engages in its own tragic battle against the restrictions of form—of the requirements that demand closure, of the reader’s need for certainty and meaning. In the modernist world of Freud, one probed beneath the surface certain to find some submerged, deeper meaning; in the postmodern world, such a journey leads one to the realization that the world no longer has the power to provide such certainty and answers—and all we can do is figure out the right questions to ask. (continue reading)

In Victoria Redel’s Already the World (Kent State University Press, 1995), there are many wonders, this but one of them, “Talking Angel.” (continue reading)

I remember wanting to writing like Jeff Landon, realizing I never would quite get there, and that being okay, then realizing later it was a silly thing to want to write like, or be as good as, someone else, but that first desire to be like Jeff drove my first flash narratives into existence, to fly as Jeff did in that first Quick Fiction tale I came to again and again. (continue reading)