3 Tips for Writing Flash Fiction

Flash fiction, or the short-short story, is popular now because of the Internet and because readers are lazy, but does it have merit? of course, more merit, at least, than poetry which ties itself to sounding good and thus is usually either banal or meaningless. Like poetry, however, the brevity leads everyone to believe that they can do it so you have a million worthless pieces of flash fiction floating around the web along with the ghazals and limericks and sonnets that would have been better off burned than shown to anybody.

Things to note before you start writing a piece of flash fiction:
1) Have something happen. Bad writers make the mistake of forgetting the reader entirely and writing what sounds good in their heads. Under the pressure of a specific word-count, they masturbate furiously with their words, coming up with writey prose signifying nothing.

2) Have something DRAMATIC happen. This is not 30-round boxing match, this is one round with a young Mike Tyson. Hit hard or die.

3) Write it as quickly as it would take to read it. If you have to think too hard, your readers probably will too.


Technorati Tags: writing, writer, flash, fiction, literature, dramatic, word-count, flash+fiction, advice