Your Month to Go Big with Small Stories!
:June is the month of long days and short stories.
We invite you to join us in National Flash Fiction Month—a challenge to write one flash fiction story every day for thirty days.
No novel-length commitments, no sprawling outlines, no agonizing over chapter structure. Just you, a prompt, and the peculiar joy of beginning something new every morning and finishing it before the day is out.
Here’s what we’re doing at the Flash Fiction Institute
- Thirty days of prompts on our Facebook, Instagram, and Substack Notes
- You write a story—any length, any style, any genre, as long as it’s flash.
- Share it with the hashtag #NationalFlashFictionMonth and we’ll repost our favorites.
- Writing sessions on Substack Live (dates to come).
- A free flash-fiction Zoom class with Grant Faulkner and Kim Culbertson on Tuesday, June 16, from 2-3 p.m. Pacific Time.
- A culminating flash “Open Mic”—and celebratory happy hour!—on June 26 from 4 – 5:30 Pacific.
Come for the prompts, stay for the community, leave with thirty stories you didn’t have in May.
But first: What is flash fiction, exactly?
Good question. Flash fiction is generally defined as a complete story told in a very small space—under 1,000 words.
The whole is a part and the part is a whole. The short format forces the writer to question each word, to reckon with Flaubert’s mot juste. At the same time the brevity of the form allows the writer “to keep a story free from explanation,” as Walter Benjamin wrote.
So why write one every day?
Because the daily practice of beginning—of finding the first line, of committing to a direction, of following a story somewhere even when you’re not sure where it’s going —is a muscle, and muscles need to be used.
Because flash fiction teaches you to trust the reader through the “art of omission.” One of the interesting things about the form is what you leave out. You don’t have to explain everything. You don’t have to resolve everything. You can end on an image, a gesture, a single line of dialogue, and trust that the reader will fill the silence with something true.
Because finishing things feels good. Writers spend so much of their lives in the middle of things—the middle of a draft, the middle of a revision, the middle of a long uncertain silence between submission and response. Flash fiction gives you the rare and underrated pleasure of done.
Because constraints enhance creativity. A daily prompt gives you a door to walk through even on the days when you’d otherwise sit at your desk staring at the wall and eventually go make yourself a third cup of coffee instead. The prompt says: start here. And starting is, as any writer knows, the hardest part.
Your invitation to National Flash Fiction Month
Here’s how it works:
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Every day in June, we’ll give you a prompt.
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You write a story—any length, any style, any genre, as long as it’s flash.
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Share it with the hashtag #NationalFlashFictionMonth and we’ll repost our favorites.
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Come for the prompts, stay for the community, leave with thirty stories you didn’t have in May.
Will every story be good? No. Will some of them surprise you? Absolutely. Will you be a better, looser, braver writer on July 1st than you were on June 1st?
We’re betting yes.
Now go write something small. Small things, as any flash fiction writer will tell you, can hold the whole world.