What is Flash Fiction?
Flash fiction is one of the broadest ways to tell a story; people give it funny names like drabble, microfiction, minisagas, spamfic. For the ScrivKids contest, we define flash fiction as between 100 to 1,500 words. The general idea is that the story portrays setting, characters, and plot in the fewest words possible. Unlike a novel or a short story, this is the type of thing you can sit down and write in five minutes. A flash fiction idea can come from a cool movie scene, or something you saw on your way home from school.
I’m going to give you four tips for how to write good flash fiction. But first, have fun with it! Our best writing happens when we do it just because we love the craft. Don’t think so much about what sounds good or how a reader would react while you’re creating. Learning the fundamentals of flash fiction now sets you up to enjoy writing it later.
Tip #1: The Beginning
One of the most intimidating parts of writing is the empty page. With flash fiction, it’s always easiest to begin in the middle of the action you have in mind. Your first line should grab the reader’s attention like a punch to the face.
You may be tempted to explain the backstory, or how things came to be where they are. This can be accomplished without giving it over right off the bat. Flash fictions don’t have much opportunity to set up the world or interiority (meaning the emotions, thoughts, and ponderings) of the characters beyond the present. In fact, they tend to only have one or two characters, and the setting remains the same.
It’s like using a magnifying glass on the climax of a normal novel. There’s lots of important detail, but all compacted into a small place. Keep the reader engulfed in what’s happening right in the chosen moment. What you choose to include should be sharp and intentional. Pick the right place to aim your magnifying glass, so that the rest of the story can be assumed without getting in the way of the action.
Tip #2: Showing And Telling
Showing means instead of stating what has happened or is happening to the reader, it’s described piece-by-piece, and the reader makes the conclusion about what is being shown themselves. In flash fiction, you normally don’t see a long explanation of how sad the character is, or how awful their parents are, or what the building they’re in looks like. Show us what you see, write it like you own it. Readers can sense whether or not they can trust who’s putting the words on the page. Showing helps them understand that their dear friend (you!) has a good story to share.
This doesn’t mean your flash fiction can’t just be a train of thought from your character, or even a mix of both showing and telling. But the point is to flesh out what you’re writing. A good example of this is a piece written by Deb Olin Unferth:
“She could see she was becoming a thoroughly unlikable person. Each time she opened her mouth she said something ugly, and whoever was nearby liked her a little less. These could be strangers, these could be people she loved, or people she knew only slightly whom she had hoped would one day be her friends. Even if she didn’t say anything, even if all she did is seem a certain way, have a look on her face, or make a soft sound of reaction, it was always unlikable—except in the few cases that she fixed herself on being likable for the next four seconds (more than that was impossible) and sometimes that worked, but not always.
Why couldn’t she be more likable? What was the problem? Did she just not enjoy the world anymore? Had the world gotten away from her? Had the world gotten worse? (Maybe, probably not. Or probably in some ways but not in the ways that were making her not like it). Did she not like herself? (Well, of course she didn’t, but there was nothing new in that.)
Or had she become less likable simply by growing older—so that she might be doing the same thing she always did, but because she was now forty-one, not twenty, it had become unlikable because any woman doing something at forty-one is more unlikable than a woman doing it at twenty? And does she sense this? Does she know she is intrinsically less likable and instead of resisting, does she lean into it, as into a cold wind? Maybe (likely) she used to resist, but now she sees the futility, so each morning when she opens her mouth she is unlikable, proudly so, and each evening before sleep she is unlikable, and each day it goes on this way, she getting more unlikable by the hour, until one morning she will be so unlikable, inconveniently unlikable, that she will have to be shoved into a hole and left there.”
This is an excellent example of a flash fiction written to expand on a specific train of thought. It’s intentionally written to portray the frantic, confused feeling of trying to earn others’ approval.
Tip #3: Room For The Reader
Apart from the main stream of the storyline, the less the reader knows, the better. As the writer, everything you know about this story is the entirety of a circle, but in order for the reader to be captured by such a short piece, you leave a small segment of this circle unfinished. Allow a little room for the reader to inhabit what you’ve written, and you’re one step closer to having an impactful story. Stephen King puts it like this: “Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should end in the reader’s.” This is especially important when you have limited length to work with. You want the result of the description, with as little explanation as is possible as long as the point gets across.
Flash fiction is often compared to writing poetry. Poems are very short and straight-to-the-point. The story unfolds with every line, and every line counts. You often see brief pieces of description, but they bring the full picture into view, allowing a little wriggle room for the reader to create the scene. A good point of reference for this would be reading the poem in the following link: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44214/preludes-56d22338dc954
Tip #4: The Ending
The last line should always come with a punch, similar to the beginning. You want your work to stick in the reader’s mind long after they’ve read it. The story needs to feel finished. This can be done in many ways — repeating something you said in the beginning, revealing a fundamental piece of information you’ve alluded to earlier, or dropping in on a sensory, personal detail just before it ends. All of these, especially the last, anchors the reader in your last line long after you finish.
If you want to read more flash fictions, here’s a good site to look at:
If you need to know more about flash fictions and how to write them: