How to Write a Flash Fic
Tell a Whole Story in a Single Picture
In the spirit of brevity, today’s Shelf Life is on flash fiction and how to write one. My qualifications for writing anything are slim, but I can say I have had better luck publishing flash than longer short stories, which has got me thinking about the relative value. I won’t say it’s objectively easier to get an accept on a flash story: Too much still depends on the quality of the individual story you’re submitting. But, all things being equal, flash has something going for it that longer short fiction doesn’t. The thing it has going for it is—it’s brevity. Again.
Fiction editors all have some kind of limitation. The limitation is what prevents them from accepting every good story they get. No fiction editor can accept everything good they see. The limitation may be down to one (or more) of these three things:
Budget—they have a limited amount of money to pay for content.
Space—they have a limited amount of pages in which to publish content.
Time—they have a limited amount of time with which to read content for consideration.
Flash solves all these problems. Flash is cheaper, because fiction sells by the word; you can buy more flash stories than longer stories with the same budget. Flash takes up less space; more flash stories than longer ones fit in the same number of pages. Flash takes less time to read than its longer counterparts.
Astute readers may have already realized that all these things are actually just different ways of saying money. With more money you can buy more stories, publish more pages, and hire more first readers for your magazine. All fiction magazines are on some kind of budget. You can be The New Yorker or The Sun but you still have a budget.
Not all magazines that take flash also take longer short fiction. I should go ahead and specify that flash means short fiction up to 1,000 words and short fiction means fiction up to 7,500 words. Flash is a subset of short fiction. Drabble and microfiction are subsets of flash fiction, but that’s not important to today’s Shelf Life.
Magazines that accept short fiction often state that they prefer shorter stories to longer ones. This is, in part, down to the reality that they can publish more stories if they focus on shorter ones. It’s probably also in part due to more-experienced authors needing fewer words to tell the same story than less-experienced authors. A story that uses more words than it needs is less likely to sell than a story that uses no more words than it needs.
That’s a Shelf Life for another day once I’ve figured out how to always use the fewest words possible to tell a story. I am not good at that.
The challenge with flash fiction is to tell a whole story—one that has a beginning (inciting incident), middle (rising action), and end (climax)—with a tightly limited amount of words. The good news is, if you overshoot you still have a short story. Short stories are still very publishable even when they’re not flash. The danger with writing flash is that you come to the end and you haven’t told a full story. You may not have gotten in enough character development for the reader to care about your character. Or, if you did, you might have come up with a character study instead of a story with a plot—there has to be action on the part of the character or characters to move the story forward. You have to include enough atmosphere to invoke a mood. You have to include something that surprises the reader—something unexpected. That’s a lot to do in 1,000 word or fewer.
I don’t have an exact recipe for great flash fiction but I have some generalizations from the way I do it that I think can be helpful to keep in mind when attempting a flash story.
Before I launch into those, I’ll share a few paying magazines that publish exclusively flash fiction. You can read through some of the offerings at these magazines to get inspired or keep the list handy for submission venues once you’ve written your own.
(They don’t all pay a lot but they all pay something.)
Start With a Picture
A picture is worth 1,000 words. A flash story is 1,000 words long. Coincidence? I think not.
I am not a visual person but I usually start a flash story from an image rather than a plot idea. I may have picked up this habit at the writing group that used to start with a quick writing exercise using a photo as a prompt. In any case, it usually works well for me.
The image I start with might be an original from my brain or it might be something I’ve seen somewhere—something I’ve seen in real life or maybe a photo or painting I’ve seen. I ask myself questions around the image, like—
How did the person in the photo come to be there?
Where are they going next?
What are they doing?
What is their motivation in that?
And use those to arrive at something resembling a plot.
Show Without Telling
Flash has no room for exposition. Generally, in fiction (both short and long), I think showing (action and dialogue) should be mixed with telling (exposition) for variety. In flash, I don’t think there’s much, if any, room for exposition. Everything in flash should be doing double duty. Character actions should be telling you about their background, their personality, or their appearance. Setting should be contributing to character development. Any mention of color should be used for symbolism or to set the mood. Dialogue should expose more than just what’s being literally said aloud. Even the things characters don’t say should say something.
Rely on What Readers Know or Can Guess
In flash, you don’t have the liberty to write down everything you need to tell the story. Some of it has to come from the reader. I think this is part of why readers enjoy flash—flash makes them work for the meaning in the story. Nothing is handed over.
You can leave things up to the readers’ inference. You don’t have to spell things out for them as long as most readers can make some inference from what you’re writing and won’t be confused. Like the walls in a house, some of the things you write in fiction are load-bearing and some are not. The non-load-bearing walls also have important functions but holding the roof up is not one of their functions.
In flash, you need to pare down to the load-bearing words and sentences. This means you don’t have those walls there to neatly tell the occupant of the space “this is the kitchen and this is the dining room and this is the living room.” It’s fine. We’ve all seen an open-plan house. People can still figure out which room they’re in even without all those interior walls.
What I mean by this extended metaphor is, you can rely on your reader to infer based on context. If a principle is universal enough that most readers know it without being told—like, guests know sofas are for sitting on—then you don’t need to spell it out in your flash fiction. Readers bring their experience of life and interactions with other humans and history of reading stories with them when they read your flash. They will use that to fill in the blanks.
A big place you can use these blanks is in character motivation. If you know what your character’s motivation is then you can describe their actions and leave the motivations unwritten. Readers will reverse-engineer the motivation based on their own experience.
Make the Character Carry It
Limit yourself to few characters. Flash is not the place for a cast of thousands. One or two characters is probably enough. If you have more characters than that, condense them. Make the characters you have more interesting and have fewer of them. Just one character with multiple personalities, that’s all you need.
Then make your character or characters do all the work. Everything that happens in the story should stem from them and their choices. Everything you need the reader to know about the inner workings of their mind should show up in the words they say (or don’t say) or the actions they take (or don’t take). Everything the reader needs to know about the setting they’re in should be filtered through the characters’ interactions with the setting. Don’t tell the reader there’s a bird in a tree, show them your character watching the bird through binoculars and writing about it in their birding journal. Or show the character firing a shotgun into the sky to scare the birds away, like the dad in Steel Magnolias.
Whatever the reader needs to know should come from the character or through the filter of that character. There’s no room for anything else.
Accept the Necessity of Ambiguity
You can’t make a reader take away from your story what you want them to take away from your story, however many words you use. This is a basic truth of writing fiction. You can’t make the reader do anything. They do whatever they want. They are ungovernable.
To release good flash fiction into the world, the writer has to accept that readers will interpret it all kinds of ways. There’s just not enough room in flash to make the meaning of anything concrete or unmistakable. Readers will mistake your meaning. They will take something else away from what you wrote than what you intended. This happens in all fiction. Anyone who’s ever been party to a heated literary discussion in an English classroom knows this. This happens more with flash because fewer words mean the writer has less control than usual.
Embrace ambiguity to write good flash. If you can learn to deliver a satisfying ending that includes ambiguity and uncertainty—one that ends the flash story but implies that the character’s story continues after the story ends—then you’ve nailed the hardest and best part of flash.
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