We are rolling into May! Hope everyone is staying healthy, washing hand, and taking care of that ever important mental health! I’ve been keeping busy, splitting my time between different photography ideas and writing lots of flash and short fiction. Which has led to me thinking a lot about brevity in writing.
Flash fiction, in my opinion, is incredibly difficult to pull off. As someone who usually prefers speculative fiction, having to tell a story in such a short amount of time is very alien to me (why tell a story if I can’t construct the entire world around it?). Still, this quarantine has been giving me lots of time to work on my short form fiction. I’ve been engaging in Write-A-Thons where I’ll try to take a story from conception to composed (not edited) in a few short boosts. These pieces range from 1,000 to 3,000 words. I’ve been getting a lot of prompts from the Reedsy Blog. They hold weekly contests, so I figured (since I’m home all the time) I figured I should submit to their contests, if only to stay in shape. You can check these stories on my Reedsy profile, which is linked through my ‘Original Fiction’ page.
One big question is, why write flash fiction? If you’ve been following me for a while, you’re familiar with the short form fiction I pop out monthly. I always treated these similar to how an artist or illustrator will post their works in progress on their websites and so I can keep my writing brain active. I love the challenge of telling a whole story in as few words as possible. As much as my heart belongs to long-form storytelling, I also enjoy giving people the option to read something short and sweet rather than hope they’ll go through a whole novel on faith that I’m a good writer. Not that we don’t have the time now, right?
What are some of your favorite short fiction pieces? What makes a piece of short fiction really entertaining?