I came across an inter­est­ing arti­cle on the short-short dur­ing a search for the text of Lex Williford’s “Pendergast’s Daugh­ter.” In The Com­mon Room, the Knox Col­lege Jour­nal of Lit­er­ary Crit­i­cism, there’s William Boast’s “The Heim­lich and Unheim­lich in Short-Short Fic­tion.” Some excerpts and thoughts. ? “Because our imag­i­na­tions tend to run wild when we […]

A selec­tion of some recent great flash fic­tion online

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? 

In his “Writ­ing Real­is­tic Dia­logue and Flash Fic­tion,” Har­vey Stan­brough writes the fol­low­ing:

If your pur­pose is to draw your read­er into your world for the dura­tion, every­thing you put on the page—every word, every sen­tence, and every bit of punctuation—must be placed with a thought for how it will affect the read­er. All oth­er con­sid­er­a­tions are sec­ondary (46).

Is it already a week ago that I won­dered about form rejec­tions? What’s on my mind today is get­ting bet­ter as a writer of (short) short fic­tion. That is the ques­tion of the day. How does one get bet­ter. One answer is to lis­ten to this song while writ­ing. But that’s not a real answer, […]

After a break of a few days, we’re back (yay us!) and ready to talk some flash. I’m cur­rent­ly teach­ing a flash fic­tion worskhop as part of Rose­mont College’s MFA pro­gram, and we’ve been enjoy­ing the essays in theThe Rose Met­al Press Field Guide To Writ­ing Flash Fic­tion: Tips from Edi­tors, Teach­ers, and Writ­ers in […]

I’m think­ing here of Keyser Söze from The Usu­al Sus­pects and that cre­ation of sto­ry from a bul­letin board. Here’s that script. 

Google alerts me when I am men­tioned in a blog. I love that. Maybe two months ago, I received the alert, clicked on the link, and found that a form rejec­tion I’d sent as the Smoke­Long Quar­ter­ly Lead Edi­tor had been post­ed on a blog with the head­ing: Unti­tled, by Ran­dall Brown. ? I didn’t […]

Now and then, I return to nov­els such as The Great Gats­by and try to fig­ure out their won­der. It of course ruins it all, most times, the fig­ur­ing it out, but now and then the process ener­gizes me to use some of their bril­liant strate­gies in my own work. In Gats­by, I love how […]

For the sec­ond time in the his­to­ry of FlashFiction.Net, Writer (Meg Pokrass) inter­views a Read­er (Tim Jones-Yelv­ing­ton) about a flash, in this case Meg’s “Cal­i­for­nia Fruit” from Smoke­Long Quar­ter­ly Issue #21. It appears below with the gen­er­ous per­mis­sion of its author.