FlashFiction.Net

A writing mission for a flash piece that adheres to some very strict guidelines. (continue reading)

A writing prompt for a flash piece that adheres to some very strict guidelines. (continue reading)

Write what Robert Swartwood has defined as “hint fiction.” (continue reading)

This Friday’s flash prompt challenges your ability to create similes as one eats chips or peanuts, one after another. (continue reading)

A flash fiction writing prompt that has something to do with adverbs and adjectives. (continue reading)

When I’m in need of inspiration, I often turn to poetry, especially some favorites: Robert Frost and Anne Sexton. (continue reading)

Friday’s Writing Prompt asks you to twist readers’ expectations right from the get-go. (continue reading)

Hitchcock had a famous description of suspense that involved a ticking bomb. Today’s Friday Prompt asks you to take that idea right to the flash fiction bank. (continue reading)

Write a flash inspired by Mr. T’s fashion show. (continue reading)

A look at THE FIRST LINE literary journal—and their “required” first lines. (continue reading)

I’ve recently been reading Roy Peter Clark’s Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer. Tool 20 asks writers to “choose the number of elements with a purpose in mind.” (continue reading)

You’ve been writing flash for awhile now. You’ve been focused on surprising readers/editors with the odd situation, the thing they’ve never seen before. Maybe you’ve even taken on the familiar story—the abused spouse, the guy-girl bar story, the terminally ill spouse/lover/parent/grandparent. Now it’s time for you to stretch those flash muscles for the Olympics of Flash Writing. Are you ready for this? You will write today about someone’s conversation with God! (continue reading)

I can’t say I’ve found a solution to this, but at least it is a concrete problem worth grappling with. With that in mind, my challenge to you is to write something Beautiful. Don’t worry if it makes any sense, follows the rules of narrative at all, write something pretty, haunting, evocative, not because of plot, but because of language. After that if you want, put it away awhile, so it isn’t so fresh. Then read it like someone else’s writing. Try to find the hole in the center, and then carefully prune back the unnecessary so the hole stands out, so the unsaid becomes apparent, even becomes stark. (continue reading)

So here’s Friday’s Flash Writing Prompt. Write in the style of noir. Make your character doomed by the very actions he/she thought would save him/her. It is Fate your character is up against, a world with an evil intent, to choose certain characters for doom, and yet that doom resides in their own characters, not in the world itself. It’s a tricky thing. Try to have someone at some point call someone “Doll.” I love that. (continue reading)

Randall had a flash prompt talking about the movie The Usual Suspects and how the villain creates an entire story using what he sees on a board in a police headquarters. It was a neat trick and a cool ending, telling us a lot about who Keyser Söze is. And what Keyser Söze is, essentially, is a prick. (continue reading)

Well, it happened. I came across something in The New Yorker I love. It came from an advertisement from Lincoln Financial Group (continue reading)

So that’s your Friday prompt. Take something from Frost’s “The Oven Bird,” and make it central to your flash. So many things to choose from, yes? (continue reading)

I’m thinking here of Keyser Söze from The Usual Suspects and that creation of story from a bulletin board. Here’s that script. (continue reading)

Some story starters and master plots (reworked). (continue reading)

Write of fall, of all the possibilities that exist within it. Use five words from “Willow Poem.” Try to remain “oblivious to winter.” (continue reading)

Unlike the hard-earned lasting epiphanies in stories, in life most (at least for me) are tiny and fleeting. They often come to me at the daily rest stops, sometimes in the shower, often at the tops of staircases. As an exercise, I decided to write some of these thoughts down for a day. (continue reading)

Bob Dylan stops by FlashFiction.Net for some inspirational photo prompts. If you’d like, try to use the associated words in the writing of your short short. Just be sure to remember that, here, a picture is worth a thousand words or less. Not a single word more. (continue reading)

For Friday’s Writing Prompt, try to find a way to give readers access to your mind and/or thinking, and have that element of the piece (this glimpse into the mind of the piece’s creator) be an essential part of the piece’s workings. (continue reading)

Think long and hard about why you avoid this subject. Then write about that subject, so that your search is the character’s search, both of you searching for the same answer. Make sure you don’t know the exact reasons for your avoidance. See what you and your character discover together. (continue reading)

As a follow-up to Thursday’s craft discussion on image patterns, here’s a suggestion I received from my MFA advisor at Vermont College, Abby Frucht. Create a list of words unique to a specific field—such as words from cooking—and then use these throughout a piece (subtly of course) in a way that both complements and creates meaning(s). Music, medicine, art, horses, and on and on. Pick your field and begin the planting. (continue reading)