Flash Fiction: It's Shorter Than Regular Fiction!

Flash fiction is a style that puts the author in a pretty strange place. You just don't have enough room to do anything that you want to do. There isn't enough room to provide much in the way of exposition. There isn't enough room to develop all three parts of a traditional story: rising action, climax, resolution. There isn't enough room for more than a couple or characters. It really hamstrings you.

That's not a bad thing, though. If anything, it forces you to focus on one thing, rather than all of them, and refine it as far as it will go. Naturally, in terms of marketable skills this makes you better at all of the individual aspects of your longer stories. I don't want to insult flash fiction as a style, but it's greatest asset in the current market really is as a practice tool.

So I want to talk about the one I showed you. The one I wrote.

I'm not going to pretend that what I've written is any kind of high literature. It's just a little story, for better or worse. But it does some things. You can look at it and see what I tried to to deal with the size limitations. There are only two characters, one point of view, and two small rooms for the action to take place. If this is any of the rising action, climax, or resolution, it's the resolution. So everything is very isolated and small, which makes working with the limitations a lot easier.

But it doesn't eliminate them. I still need to show what came before the resolution for anything to make sense. I still need to track an emotion or emotional journey for both characters, and I need both of them to be something with more depth than cardboard. The only way to do this is to have details, thoughts, and dialogue all do more than one thig at a time. When the mother speaks, she is talking to herself and her daughter. When she doesn't pull the sheets up over her daughter's shoulders, it is both letting go and being spiteful. I made as many things as I could work in this way because there's not much choice.

There are still problems, of course. Very little happens. Everything is small and relatively unengaging. The daughter is a bit underdeveloped. And so on like that.

But it was great practice, can act as a solid writing sample in certain cases, and is a hell of a lot easier to post than 15 pages of short story!