Writing a Very Short Story

What story is really worth writing? Worth spending your time, energy, and imagination on? I like what Susan Sontag says, “The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader’s heart.” Whenever I read that—it’s on a slip of paper tacked on corkboard above my desk—what comes to mind is flash fiction. It’s bite-size insight. It’s sudden. It surprises.

What’s Flash Fiction?

Whatever you call a brief prose story, it is shorter than a conventional short story and its compression links it to narrative poetry. Put another way, it’s a mash-up of short story and poetry. It’s one to five pages long. Every single word in flash fiction must work hard. Seek out strong adjectives. Delete adverbs. Name colors, sounds, smells, and feelings. Involve as many of the five senses as is appropriate. No word can be wasted. Focus, focus, focus, is my mantra when I write short-short prose—or anything. That’s not always easy, is it? But without focus, writing gets sloppy and weak—and too long. Stay strong!

A Book About Flash Fiction

Here’s a little story about a book. In 1988—yeah, ancient times—I took a creative writing class. Our teacher assigned us a book about writing these very short stories. Although I don’t have what I wrote, I do still have that book: Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories, edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas. 1986.

One of my favorite stories in the book is Robert Kelly’s “Rosary.” The opening: “Here is a man walking on a road under the half-moon. The trees are tall and well-furred; the light is little. In his left hand, sometimes swinging at his side and sometimes held lightly poised over his heart, he counts the crystal beads of a rosary. After a quarter of a mile of dark road, he passes a large building of some hard to determine kind.” Hooked? I am. The entire story is only one page long. It has an O. Henry ending.

Sudden Fiction was published thirty-three years ago, but what it offers is as fresh as a Florida rainstorm that renders tropical plants bright green. The book offers fabulous stories from one to five pages long, including work from Grace Paley, John Cheever, Roy Blount, John Updike, Mary Robison, and Tobias Wolff, just to name a few. In the Introduction, I love what Robert Shapard says about these works: “The name short-short story may be relatively new, but its forms are as old as parable and fable, myth and exemplum. …these works exist regardless of any name we give them, and thoughtful readers have always known that the essence of story lies little with theory and not at all in length—Randall Jarrell has noted that stories can be as short as a sentence—but in wishes, dreams, and sometimes truth.”

Writing Flash Fiction for the Florida Writers Association

Did you know that The Florida Writer Magazine invites FWA members to submit short prose of no more than 700 words or poems no longer than 50 lines? I encourage you to participate. I have sent submissions and two of my stories were published. While they could have been shorter than 700 words, I hogged the whole limit in each one. That’s just me. However, I think it’s the process—published or not—that gives us a wonderful way to practice confining our writing to a strict word-count and meeting a deadline. Recently, I told some non-writing type friends that without deadlines I wouldn’t get much done! They had a notion about “the muse” being in charge of writing. Well … yes and no.

Submissions requirements for The Florida Writer Magazine can be found here.

Additional Reading

• Flash! Writing the Very Short Story. John Dufresne. W.W. Norton & Co. 2018.
• How to Write Poetry. 2nd edition. Nancy Bogen. Macmillan General Reference. An ARCO Book. 1994.