Not to bela­bor the sub­ject, but Google Dri­ve real­ly does make my writ­ing life eas­i­er to man­age.

As some­one who is new to writ­ing very short fic­tion, I have recent­ly re-learned the impor­tance of the tired old Eng­lish-class phrase “show, don’t tell.” 

There are many ways you can choose to orga­nize your cre­ative writ­ing sub­mis­sions. I’m more of a min­i­mal­ist who tends to avoid spread­sheets at all costs

As a begin­ner, one of the most dif­fi­cult aspects of flash fic­tion is just that: how to begin.

Sub­mit­ting my work for pub­li­ca­tion was some­thing I was utter­ly clue­less about before start­ing an MFA pro­gram. But I soon came to real­ize that there’s a whole lit­er­ary world out there that’s look­ing for good con­tent to pub­lish.

The thir­ty-five sto­ries in Kuzhali Manickavel’s col­lec­tion Insects Are Just Like You And Me Except Some Of Them Have Wings allow the read­er to enter into a strange world, like ours but not, in which char­ac­ters take in the col­ors of their sur­round­ings just as vivid­ly as they cat­a­log the hap­pen­ings inside their bod­ies and minds. 

I’ve already writ­ten con­sid­er­ably more words about it here than actu­al­ly com­prise the sto­ry.

Over­all, “Para­noid Fan­ta­sy in 225 Words” is an incred­i­bly fun and intrigu­ing sto­ry. It is an excel­lent exam­ple of how sparse details can actu­al­ly ben­e­fit cer­tain pieces, and how a writer can cre­ate a great sto­ry by turn­ing the mun­dane into a twist­ed, humor­ous ver­sion of real­i­ty.

Per­haps some of the smartest advice I ever got was from Julian­na Bag­gott back when I was an MFA stu­dent at the Blue­grass Writ­ers Stu­dio. Speak­ing to a room full of aspir­ing cre­ative writ­ers she said that in order to write a book you have sit your butt in a chair and write the book.

As a writer, I’m drawn to clas­sic tragedy texts that com­pact con­flict and suspense–while also deal­ing with seri­ous or exis­ten­tial sub­ject matter–in plays approx­i­mate­ly 60 pages in length. How did the great clas­si­cal writ­ers, such as Euripi­des, do it?