A 50-word micro fic­tion piece. 

Must a prose writer love the sen­tence the way a poet, say, loves the line?

I’m a suck­er for that tingly feel­ing I get when inspi­ra­tion hits, but in the old days, I didn’t act on the frag­ile ones, the ones too slen­der to devel­op for 3000–4000 words. Didn’t have enough time or abil­i­ty to do them jus­tice. Then I got hooked on flash.

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.

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. 

Five fifty-word micro fic­tions

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.

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.

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.

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.