Blessed be moments, millimeters, and even humbler than these, the shadows of all tiny things.
—FERNANDO PESSOA
The Flash Fiction Institute is a space for writers of micro-fiction, short-shorts, miniatures, tiny fiction, sudden fiction, hint fiction, postcard fiction, post-it fiction, and all those curious about how less is more. In short, Flash Fiction Institute is an online school and resource hub for flash fiction writers.
We offer virtual classes taught by well-established and talented authors, along with writing prompts, craft articles, coaching support, and curated listings of literary journals and upcoming calls for submission.
Whether you’re just beginning to explore the art of flash or you’re a seasoned writer looking to sharpen your craft, the Flash Fiction Institute welcomes you. Our resources are designed to support writers at every stage, offering guidance, inspiration, and practical tools to deepen your practice.
More About Flash
Flash is a type of border crossing into a different land of storytelling, especially the “short-shorts” of the world of micro fiction (stories less than four hundred words).
For one, in flash fiction, the reader is trusted implicitly. This unspoken collaboration between writer and reader is one of the qualities that makes flash fiction both enjoyable and addictive.
Great flash fiction tends to create vivid emotional impressions which stick to the reader’s brain. It is mysterious and wonderful, how tiny compressed stories can capture pathos in a bottle in a way that longer stories and novels do not.
Julio Ortega says in the flash series he calls Diario Imaginario that he prefers to write them with cheap hotel pens because of the feeling of “provisional, momentary writing.”
The writer Leesa Cross-Smith says flash stories “are here and they are gone…we’re talking not much room for backstory, we’re talking drive-thru stories and quickies and pit stops and sneaky, stolen kisses and breathless sprints and gotta go.”
Characters are created on the head of a pin, and backstory is implied, yet left unspoken. In his fifty-two-word story “Lint,” Richard Brautigan ponders the events of his childhood and compares them to lint, “pieces of a distant life that have no form or meaning.”
Except that by capturing these small, intense moments we’re elevating the lint-like stories of our lives into something much more. The flash form speaks to the singularity of such stray moments by calling attention to the spectral blank spaces around them. Flash allows stories to capture the running water of the everyday.