Flash Fiction: The Story in a Thousand Words

Flash fiction is a complete story told in fewer than about a thousand words, and often in three hundred. It is a form defined by length, and therefore defined by what it leaves out: the backstory, the explaining, the second scene, the tidy resolution. What makes it a story rather than a fragment is that something changes. A flash may hold one gesture, one decision or one withheld truth, but by the last sentence the situation must be different from what it was in the first. The two rules that follow from that are to begin as late as possible and to stop as soon as possible. Characteristic techniques - Enter late, leave early: no weather report, no throat-clearing. - One event and one turn; no subplot, no second scene. - Implication over statement: a reader assembles the past from a single detail. - White space: a gap on the page can carry a jump of years. - A title doing more work than a title normally does. An original example, written for this platform The Last of the Water The taps had been dry since Tuesday. On Thursday my daughter filled the kettle from the bucket and boiled it anyway, and we drank it like a ceremony. On the sixth day she asked, in the voice she used for strangers, whether we should learn to swim. I said we should learn to carry less. She put the bucket down, and I saw that she had been carrying it properly all week, with both hands, the way I never taught her. How the example works The story opens in the middle of a shortage that is never explained, names one event and one question, and turns on a single observation in the last sentence. In about a hundred words the situation has changed and the relationship has been re-read. The drought is barely described, because the story is not about the drought. Practical guidance Write the draft without counting, then cut the first paragraph and see whether the story still stands, because it usually will. Keep one character and one place. Let one concrete object carry the situation instead of a paragraph of explanation, and trust the reader with more than feels comfortable. Exercise to try Take a scene you have already written and cut it to three hundred words without summarizing it. Then cut fifty more, removing only words rather than events. Revision tips Look for the turn, and if you cannot find it, the piece is a sketch and needs a change of situation. Check that the last sentence does something rather than stopping. Cut adverbs and scene-setting. Finally, read it aloud: flash fiction is short enough to hear in one breath, and anything that slows that breath is an excess word.