FlashFiction.Net

This entry thinks about ways to guide readers about how a specific flash piece might be read. (continue reading)

Pictures of Kipper. Kipper oh Kipper. (continue reading)

A look at the “positive” rejection. (continue reading)

A short video from Flash Woman & College Boy about the elusive understanding for those writing flash fiction. (continue reading)

Some tell-tale signs that you’ve developed a literary flash crush. (continue reading)

Michael Ventura’s “The Talent of the Room” discusses the need for writers to learn to tolerate the anxiety of writing hour after hour, day after day, year after year. (continue reading)

As much as we try to define it, especially once we move beyond word count, flash eludes these definitions, and each new flash and each new flash writer participates in the process of both affirming and recreating some previous sense of what flash should be. (continue reading)

Today, I’m a proud guest of Flash Fiction Chronicles as I put FLASH FICTION under the harsh glare of the interrogation lamp and figure out what FLASH FICTION desires. (continue reading)

This entry looks at Peter Elbow’s discussion of two contrary impulses in the writing teacher, to share or not, and how that might apply to the flash fiction writer. (continue reading)

Some days I am full to bursting with words to write down, other days find me empty and sputtering. Writing has spun out of a passion, but with a degree looming somewhere in the distance that proclaims that I am a “master” of creative writing, I am beginning to question if it also should be a daily habit. Is daily creation the key? Based on the following quotes, it seems I can sit down diligently every day and type out the required allocation of words, but I can also spend time reflecting on my words and store them up for long spurts of creativity. (continue reading)

Many writing workshops and critiques follow a predictable order. At my MFA, we often began each critique with a sentence of something “we liked about the piece.” That led to a brief discussion of “likes,” but then made that turn to things we didn’t like quite as much, and that’s what the rest of the workshop focused upon: things we didn’t like and how a writer might improve them. (continue reading)

A beginning look at Mary Ruefle’s first prose collection, THE MOST OF IT. (continue reading)

Nancy Sommers writes, “It is in the thrill of the pull between someone else’s authority and our own, between submission and independence that we must discover how to define ourselves. In the uncertainty of that struggle, we have a chance of finding the voice of our own authority. Finding it, we can speak convincingly…at long last.” (continue reading)

So, for this Wednesday’s Therapy session, in my humble opinion, writers should just flat-out say what it is they are comfortable saying without the attached “not really.” It makes perfect sense, at the beginning of an article on flash, to establish one’s credentials, as it makes similar sense to promote something (your self or a journal or an MFA program or an award or a press) in the bio. (continue reading)

You have these—don’t you?—those days when writing has you whupped, when writing (both as process and product) has you remove your gloves: “No más. No más.” (continue reading)

I recently asked an illustrious group of writers, “What do you find within yourself when you write? Is it something that you find at other times?—or is it something that you find only through writing?” Because I don’t have permission to write their answers here, I’ll talk instead about what arose in me reading their answers, that sense of community, the feeling that I’ve found my people. It might be too much to say that I wept reading what they confronted & experienced when writing, but I felt that building of pressure behind the eyes that my therapist tells me is what other people call “emotion,” but I have no word for. (continue reading)

My problem (well one of many) is an inability to tolerate uncertainty—and of course the world’s full of uncertainty, so life is, to put it mildly, a bit of an adventure. Uncertainty creates anxiety and anxiety creates the desire to relieve it, and the way to do that is to make the thing creating the anxiety end as soon as possible. And that desire (for things to end quickly) might not be a great characteristic for a lover, but, as one might guess, it’s a pretty darn good one for the writer of flash fiction. (continue reading)

If you write it, (eventually) they will come (the acceptances, that is), and then what will you do. You might dream of more important, more prestigious places, and even those might very well come. For the flash writer, there’s the possibility of going really big with a “novel-in-flashes,” but more likely it will be a collection/chapbook from a smaller press and that too might be in your future. What will you do with all these acceptances? How will you ever recover? (continue reading)

Using a dream as a writing prompt could lead to something beautiful. (continue reading)

When Lady GaGa sings “got my flash on,” I think to myself, “That’s the way I roll, too.” (continue reading)

I started writing flash fiction before I found it in the world—and I’m still full of wonder when I encounter it. Surely not a definitive list, here, in no particular order, are nine (9) things I’m thankful for in the world of flash fiction. (continue reading)

Mary L. Tabor was Rosemont College’s Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow last week. She is the author of The Woman Who Never Cooked , winner Mid-List Press First Series Award, and she is writing a “live” memoir at http://www.maryltabor.blogspot.com. Each entry is a piece of flash memoir. (continue reading)

When it came time to do a reading, I had often thought that, because I wrote very short fictions, I had it easy. I didn’t have to read part of a novel, part of a short story, or piece together tiny parts of a longer piece. A listener could easily leave a reading of a longer piece unsatisfied, and it seemed (at times) that the author was more concerned with filling listeners with the desire to buy the book (and see how the story ends) than with satisfying listeners’ desires for stories.I’ve come to grasp (and this thought might be part of the larger issue of self-doubt) that flash can be a very unsatisfying listen, maybe an especially unsatisfying one. (continue reading)

Jürgen Fauth at Fictionaut has created Writing Spaces, “a series dedicated to the desks, cafes, libraries and retreats where Fictionaut writers work, providing a window to the physical places where some of the stories on the site originated.” (continue reading)

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. (continue reading)

I had a great time this weekend as a participant in Philadelphia Stories Push To Publish Workshop. As part of a panel on “Submitting Your Short Story,” I found myself saying, “I totally grant the possibility that a story I sent out sucks, and I do give rejections and comments the power (eventually) to let me know such a thing. But I would never grant them the power to determine whether I’m a writer or not. No one gets to decide that but me.” (continue reading)

How do they generate so many stories? I thought, “What if I actually did start writing a series and the well ran dry?” That then led to the thought, “What if my well runs dry period?” Comics, novels, poems—what would I do if I woke up and couldn’t think of a single creative thought? (continue reading)

I’m new to the world of flash fiction. I’ll gladly admit it usually takes me upwards of 50,000 words to tell a story. Why? I like complicated plots with numerous characters. But I have to admit that there is something about flash fiction that intrigues me. A better way to put it might be that flash fiction challenges me in a way than novel-length does not—brevity. (continue reading)

Today’s my birthday (44!), so I took a break from the normal Thursday craft entry to tell everyone that I love The Kooks. Listen to them today and be inspired. (continue reading)

I do love that about writing and find myself missing that aspect of it, being in that room, with just me and my writing. (continue reading)

My grandfather had always carried in his wallet a poem I’d written him, and he’d stop people on the street to read it to them. That he did such a thing maybe has more with my being a writer today than anything else. At the time, few people believed in me. (continue reading)

Just as blogs get defined by the number of visitors, page views, hits, so too, I’ve begun to fear, do virtual writers. In other words, my fear is that quantity (the number of stories published) has become a defining feature of one’s “value” as a writer. Writers, as do most of us, now exist both virtually and really—and one hears of literary agents immediately doing internet searches of writers to see if they truly exist. Perhaps that’s a bit of exaggeration, but I’ve gotten more than a few publications and editors interested me mainly through my appearing often enough during their searches for them to assume I must matter in the tiny world of flash. (continue reading)

The doctor is out today (probably golfing), and that means that today’s therapy session takes you back to a features article I did for SmokeLong Quarterly, “To Write or Not to Write?”. (continue reading)

Each rejection says to me, “We didn’t love your story enough.” The danger for writers is replacing the [your story] with [you], so that each rejection says, “We didn’t love you enough.” That has never been the case for me as part of an editorial staff. (continue reading)