The founder of Post­Se­cret designed a project, orig­i­nal­ly an art exhi­bi­tion, for peo­ple to cre­ate a post­card to por­tray a secret they had nev­er pre­vi­ous­ly revealed to any­one. This secret must be truth­ful and not pre­vi­ous­ly shared with any­one. Some of the secrets are fright­en­ing, some embar­rass­ing, some hope­ful. I was intro­duced to the book a few years bac

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.”

While read­ing The Under­neath by Kathi Appelt I was struck not only by the incred­i­ble writ­ing —one rea­son you should read her book—but as I read chap­ter after chap­ter, I began to real­ize each one was in of itself a piece of flash fic­tion. I had the great plea­sure of inter­view­ing her, and I asked her about The Under­neath, her use of the short chap­ter struc­ture, as well as a few oth­er ques­tions.

Also unique to the struc­ture of this nov­el are the short, indi­vid­u­al­ly com­plete, chap­ters – rarely more than a thou­sand words. 

And here are The Eleven Essen­tials to Writ­ing Great Flash Fic­tion. (Coin­ci­den­tal­ly, these are the eleven things I try to do when writ­ing flash fic­tion)

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.

Writ­ing in Psy­chol­o­gy Today, Satoshi Kanaza­wa dis­cuss­es impos­tor syn­drome: “Many high­ly accom­plished women suf­fer from the feel­ing that they are impos­tors and they do not belong where they are and they don’t deserve what they have accom­plished through their own tal­ent and hard work.” I shall add this to my list of “dis­or­ders” I share […]

John Edgar Wide­man is the writer who has been the most sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence on my own work. So, as I work through the chal­lenge of writ­ing my own flash pieces, I was struck to come across this piece. Wide­man is not known as a “flash” writer, but a nov­el­ist, short sto­ry writer, and essayi

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 […]

Some quick tips for titles: See if the first line can be delet­ed and work instead as the title. Exam­ple: She’s a Stork She’s a stork and [And] that makes it ungrace­ful to bowl. The only thing falling for her here are pins, and not that many. Same with the last line. I’d Hard­ly Call […]