Tricks and Tips for Flash Fiction Writing
How short can you make a flash-fiction story?
Ernest Hemingway supposedly wrote: “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” Whether or not he really came up with that micro-tale, its six words hint at more pathos than some 1,000-page books. Read it aloud, and feel that faint rustling of sadness in your gut.
So I guess the answer to the previous question is “six words.” Maybe we should frame the query a little differently: how powerful can you make a flash-fiction story?
A Flash-Fiction Story is Still a Story
I’ve been listening to a lot of standup comedy lately. Some of the best comedians — my favorites include Marc Maron, Tig Notaro, and Patton Oswalt — can tell a devastatingly effective tale in two or three minutes. Over the course of hundreds of shows, they use the audience as a whetstone to sharpen their writing and delivery, until the tales are diamond sharp.
(Listening to standup helps with my own writing. It reminds me to craft my story arcs more tightly, and make sure they end with some sort of payoff. During the editing rounds for one of my books, A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps, I would sometimes take a break and listen to Oswalt’s “My Weakness Is Strong,” which is a masterwork in narrative build-up, not to mention seeming digressions that…
