Brevity and Word Choice
“I don’t think I learned how to write remotely well, until I started writing flash. Before having a word limit, I had what I call a real case of the hi-hellos-what’s ups, my lines would be really repetitive. It would take me 15 pages to tell a 7-page story. Writing flash gave me the most important skill I think an aspiring writer can have: learn how to be your own relentless editor.”
“I believe that constraint, in writing or in film, can lead to greater ingenuity. You can’t fall back on the easy option. It’s one of the things I love about flash fiction. It is more difficult (and more rewarding) to say something well in a thousand words than in a hundred thousand.”
“For true creative freedom, I need forms that demand compression, restraint.”
“Don’t use any extra words. A sentence is a machine; it has a job to do. An extra word in a sentence is like a sock in a machine.”
“Of course the justness of a word sometimes resides in the precise degree of discomfort it inflicts.”
“Learn to love specificity.”
“If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams—the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.”
“A writer of short fiction has to trust the reader to get the point the first time around, has to trust that if she does it right, there’s no need for excessive elaboration, and no need to beat the reader over the head with the point.”
Get in. Get out. Don’t linger. Go on”
“Wringing language dry, I force excess from early drafts. This might mean leaving something bare, just the skeleton of elements. Or it might mean the sound of dripping, the sense of something lightening, trailing off, expressing, weeping.”
“I guess the challenge has always been for me, the most interesting challenge is how do you take a constraint and turn it into an opportunity to make something really unique in the world?”
“I think writing itself is, from the start, distillation. When I write, I’m trying to distill how I need to say a thing down to the fewest and most necessary words.”
Writing Process and Experience
“The way the short story works is like putting a grain of sand under a microscope — looking at one thing very carefully, but by magnifying that one thing you see all kinds of other things.”
“While flash fiction may be quickly read, it is not often quickly written… To be brief takes time.”
“The power of micro is that it is telegraphic and telepathic, in the same place at the same time, where the space is small and time is short. Confused? Write it down to figure it out, like with a poem. It is compression without compromise. Compulsion okay. Get in and get out, if you can. Let the silence speak. You’ve heard it all before: theories on invention and serendipity, urgency that can lead to epiphany — don’t think, think — with language flying all over the place. It’s hard work. Some people talk about tricks, clever ways to get there. I only know that the good stuff comes from someplace underground and grows organically. The really good stuff that surfaces is hard to find, like black truffles and albino asparagus and morel mushrooms.”
“The market urges writers to think bigger, act bolder, be more ambitious. But flash doesn’t care a whit about the market. It’s a middle finger to our whole system of capitalism, its demands and imperatives. There is no such thing as a commercial flash fiction writer. No Thomas Kinkade or Michael Bay. We don’t do this work for remuneration. (Partly because there is none.) We do it to be accomplices to beauty, to produce pieces that aren’t mediated by the latest taste or trend. I’m talking art in the margins. In the recesses. In the tiniest of cracks.”
“My response to denigrations of flash fiction has always been simple: if you think it’s so easy to write, I dare you to give it a try.”
“When I write long, I usually take every opportunity to expand on the story, to diverge from the primary narrative and delve into a character’s past, but when I write flash fiction I don’t do that. I avoid that detour. I pass that rest stop. With flash fiction, I always keep an eye on my mileage so I can make the trip as beautiful and efficient as possible. So my advice would be to pay attention to your writing habits and identify those places where you would naturally expand on a narrative. Once you’re conscious of that, then you can choose when and where you do it.”
“One of the great pleasures of writing flash fiction for me is not knowing so much about my characters. Oftentimes with longer stories, I spend so much time writing and thinking outside the story that by the time I’m done with the story, I feel like I’ve written a novel or two or that I could have, what with all the material I developed and how well I know those characters’ lives. Flash fiction is kind of the opposite. There are exceptions to this for sure, but much of the time I don’t know a whole lot about the characters’ lives outside of the small world of the story. I embrace mystery and, well, ignorance to some extent. I take instinct’s outstretched hand, and I don’t ask so many questions about where we’re going.”
“In a world where we all feel pressed for time, flash allows readers and writers to experiment without inhibition. We can try a new author/voice/form, and concentrate entirely on that one thing, without fretting over “losing” the time we’re dedicating to it. If someone who doesn’t think they have time to read a whole novel still carves out time for flash fiction, that’s a good thing.”
“I write flash because brevity brings clarity for me… And when I finish a flash and I feel like I’ve been funny or said something meaningful, then, a lot of the time, I feel even more satisfied than if I had done that in six times the space.”
“I submit that women are better at flash fiction because they have learned to speak large in the smallest spaces. They have learned to be heard through the cracks; to be brief because that moment is all they’ll get; to make the most powerful case, the most powerful art, in the seconds between the men and their doorstop novels. I submit that women have learned how to make small fictions because they have had to, and like everything women writers do, they have turned a “small” form into an art and started a fire in the world.”
Inspiration
“Short stories are fueled by epiphanies and epiphanies are, by their very nature, fleeting.”
“Somehow it is the story idea itself that decides. When I get an idea for a flash story, it almost always comes as a fully complete story idea—except for the words, the language, to tell the story. If I get an idea for a longer story, I usually know how the story begins—but not how it continues and never how it ends. Somehow the language and the story elements themselves contrive to take me there. I’ve never started a flash story that turned into a longer story. Nor have I started a long story and realized it should be much shorter than I imagined.”
“Blessed be moments, millimeters and, even humbler than these, the shadows of all tiny things.”
“I love the way that compressing a story into a couple of sentences can act as a kind of crucible to help you find the story that you want to tell. Who is your protagonist? What do they want and what is standing in their way? What is the catalyst for this story? Similarly, I find that the compression of flash fiction can act, as editor Swati Khurana has said, as a kind of pressure cooker.”
“I love embracing the nuances of life and capturing them in writing: the way a yellow sunset looks on a new bed of snow, the high I get on a bike ride with a friend when riding on the railroad tracks in the industrial part of the city. Ice skating with my son on his first time visiting me after being away in college. Capturing the sensory details. Those are the things that make stories to me. They collectively form the plots of my life, and I enjoy the freedom in fictionalizing them, and changing the parts of them into an art form. I told a friend of mine recently that it’s like a snapshot, a Polaroid, and each collection is like a collage of them, and it’s up to the reader to determine his/her own way of interpreting.”
Form/Qualities of Flash Fiction
“I’m often asked to define flash fiction in interviews and almost out of a sense of duty, I provide the standard answer (flash fiction is a story of 1,000 words or fewer), but it feels so dissatisfying to say this. Yes, that’s flash at its most basic but to those of us who read, write, and teach it, it’s so much more than that! To say flash is a short story, only smaller, feels much too, well, reductive.”
“I would say to avoid thinking of flash fiction as a truncated short story. That is simply not what it is. It is its own, unique animal, and reading flash fiction is the best way to understand how that animal behaves—or doesn’t.”