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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)

I'm not sure if this moment is real or imagined—of finding, in my mother's closet, the Kiddie City receipt for the presents Santa brought me. In the (real or pretend) memory, I'm thrilled to discover it, to think that they created this world for me, that (for the briefest of moments) I was at the center of their attentions.

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It is the opposite reaction of most "lost of innocence" short fictions, and so that is your Friday Writing Prompt: Write of a discovery that destroys innocence in the most wonderfulest of ways, leading not to sorrow but to joy, the kind you get when you unwrap a present & find the thing you were too afraid to wish for, to even whisper it aloud, but there it is. Yours.

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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)

Pia Z. Ehrhardt, writing in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field, talks of "joist-like sentences" in flash, "sentences where the energy settles, the focus tightens, and the truths that bear (bare) the story become clear" (129), a sentence that leads her to think "How did my story go from something I wanted to tell you to something I'm afraid for you to know, but that I must now talk about?" (130).

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Desire drives narratives into being, we are told, over and over. Mark Budman, also in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide, writes, "The protagonist must desire something and her desire has to reach its crescendo by the 500th word. The object of her desire doesn't have to be big, but it's important to her and it's important to the reader" (126).

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As a writing teacher, I've become more and more focused on the desire of flash writers, rather than on characters and readers and texts, a desire that leads them to write, recognize, and confront those joist-like sentences. In other words, I think of how the writer must desire something, something beyond wanting to write a story or flash, beyond wanting to be published, beyond wanting readers to be entertained and enlightened, beyond meeting the desire of texts for endings and meanings.

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So your Friday Prompt is to look over your flashes that have yet to realize themselves.Search them for those joist-like sentences, and write with the desire to write towards that sentence, rather than around it.

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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)

Dry stone is a building method by which structures are constructed from stones without any mortar to bind them together. In New England, dry-stone walls (rock fences) are common. Boulder walls are a type of single wall in which the wall consists primarily of large boulders, around which smaller stones are placed. Single walls work best with large, flatter stones. Ideally, the largest stones are being placed at the bottom and the whole wall tapers toward the top. Sometimes a row of capstones completes the top of a wall, with the long rectangular side of each capstone perpendicular to the wall alignment. (from Wikipedia)  

Mending Wall
Robert Frost
Click here to hear Robert Frost's reading of "Mending Wall" from Bread Loaf.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

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Now, write a flash, 500 words or less, that somehow "borrows" from the poem. Maybe a character from the poem appears in your flash. Maybe you are inspired by Frost's playfulness (how about that pun on offense and that the "something that sends the frozen ground-swell under it" is frost), the varied meanings of mending, the irony of coming together to build a separating wall, neighbors, and so on. Try to use ten (10) words from the poem in your flash.

Then, after it's reviewed, revise it and send it to Quick Fiction. Wait for the good news. Thank me in your Pushcart acceptance speech.

First, consider the following poem by Anne Sexton.

The Moss of His Skin

Young girls in old Arabia were often buried alive next to their dead fathers, apparently as sacrifice to the goddesses of the tribes...

—Harold Felderman, “Children of the Desert,” Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Review, Fall 1958.

It was only important
to smile and hold still
to lie down beside him
and to rest awhile,
to be folded up together
as if we were silk,
to sink from the eyes of mother
and not to talk.
The black room took us
like a cave or a mouth
or an indoor belly.
I held my breath
and daddy was there,
his thumbs, his fat skull,
his teeth, his hair growing
like a field or a shawl.
I lay by the moss
of his skin until
it grew strange. My sisters
will never know that I fall
out of myself and pretend
that Allah will not see
how I hold my daddy
like an old stone tree.

from Jessica Helfand's "Anne Sexton's Scrapbook"

Click on picture for more.

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Now, using at least ten (but as many as you can) words (good ones, not "the," "of," "an," etc.) from this poem, write a piece [flash fiction] about a daddy and daughter doing something you wouldn't expect a daddy and daughter to do. <500 wds.