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! 

So, have at it. Work your mag­ic so instead of say­ing, “So what?” after read­ing your flash, we are say­ing, “By George, I think I’ve got it!” Or some­thing like that.

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?

Rob Parnell’s arti­cle “Writ­ing An Act of Mag­ic” begins, “You have thoughts. You write them down as words. Lat­er, oth­ers read them and your thoughts become theirs. Spooky, eh? I’m sure it was once, when the Druids roamed pre­his­toric Europe, exchang­ing infor­ma­tion in the form of archa­ic sym­bols.”

Yes­ter­day, I came across Lau­ra Ellen Scott’s VIPs on vsf, a blog devot­ed to “col­lect­ing very short thoughts about very short fic­tion” from some very impor­tant peo­ple, includ­ing (to date) Robert Swart­wood (Nor­ton Hint Anthol­o­gy Edi­tor), Rox­anne Gay (PANK), Sean Lovelace (Rose Met­al Press Chap­book Win­ner), Scott Gar­son (wigleaf ), Ellen Park­er (FRiGG), and numer­ous oth­er lumi­nar­ies.

So I have to con­fess, I end­ed up tak­ing a flash fic­tion class, because the poet­ry sem­i­nar I want­ed to take unex­pect­ed­ly closed. I write poet­ry, often for­mal poet­ry. While I knew intel­lec­tu­al­ly as part of my MFA pro­gram I want­ed to get to where I was more com­fort­able as a writer of prose, I cer­tain­ly didn’t expect to be in the deep end my first semes­ter!

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.

One of the things that has been dif­fi­cult for me to inter­nal­ize about writ­ing flash fic­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly as some­one used to writ­ing poet­ry, is that one of the best ways to move things for­ward is often just to tell the read­er what you want them to know.  Now I should take a step back, and […]

Using a dream as a writ­ing prompt could lead to some­thing beau­ti­ful.

That is the flash fic­tion ques­tion for today. If you go against expec­ta­tion, how do you make it clear to read­ers that they are to read it dif­fer­ent­ly, that you are aware of the expec­ta­tion they bring to your piece and you are aware of how that expec­ta­tion might lead them away from the “point” of your piece?