Flash fiction can be a powerful tool to develop your craft and sharpen your writing skills. You will commonly not be able to use more than 1,500 words to compose your story. This can be a daunting task. Trying to create characters and placing them in a realistic setting and then testing them with an engaging plot before resolving it in about 4 pages is not for the faint of heart. But, overcoming these challenges will help any writer gain the knowledge and skill to enable effective creation of much longer stories by weaving small segments into a longer experience for the reader.
The more you write flash fiction the more you will realise this form of writing mirrors our own lives. Most of us remember our lives in flashes: brief and powerful. Whether these moments are painful, joyous, shocking or wonderful, they change the way we perceive everything. We can remember these moments in perfect detail, easily recalling every smell, taste, sound, and sight. Learning to recall these moments and focus on tiny details will help you capture and project valuable moments in your stories to your reader.
To begin practising flash fiction, think back to a time in your life. Maybe it was something as simple as a conversation with a friend, or as painful as an argument with a family member or a solitary experience that made you learn about who you really are. Try to remember everything around you, the aromas, your surroundings, the voices and begin writing in as much detail as you can. Throw all you have at the page until you have exhausted your memory of the event.
After this initial step, spend some time editing what you have written. Remove what didn’t really add to your experience of the moment. This might be the sounds of the crowd, the chill of the weather or the feel of what you were wearing. Boil the story down with your red pen until all that’s left is anything you can’t live without. During this process it’s not uncommon to watch a 2,200 word story be whittled down to 1,300. And after you have practised reliving and writing down these stories and then rebuilding them with revisions, you will have a much better feel for the bare essentials of a story.
Now, take a character you can’t ignore any more or a setting that is so clear in your mind it feels like it’s just around the corner and begin writing. Let the words flow and describe your character(s), paint the setting and construct the plot and turn the fire up under the conflict. Live inside the moment you are creating with your imagination and experience it as if it were your memory and not a work of pure fiction.
Keep doing this over and over. Experiment with how you tell these stories. Create one using only dialogue or exploring a group of people, make some with a single character who never utters a word, maybe with dragons or aliens, some about what ifs, or about the past, and tell of love or great loss. Work on keeping an engaging pace and characters that the reader will identify with and care about.
Doing all of this will allow you, as a writer, to explore different ways to think about creating your stories, and it will challenge you to exit your comfort zone and create something fresh. You will find yourself writing with more vivid detail, sharper dialogue and more intriguing plot lines. And if it doesn’t come together at the end, that’s okay, because you haven’t wasted months writing a novel that falls apart. You can start over with something else from the idea pile and see where the adventure takes you.
Practising this cycle of creating and editing your work, using flash fiction, will allow you to build on your experience and develop your skills more quickly. And when you decide the time is right to embark on a longer journey and you begin the novel you have dreamt of writing, you will have a great deal of experience under your belt.
Andrew Ewing lives in Denver, Colorado U.S.A. with his wife Sara and their children Ronan and Emily. Andrew is a full-time manager of a major home improvement retailer. He spends his free time writing flash fiction and short stories. He enjoys discussing all aspects of the writing life and public speaking on the craft.
