13 Tips for Writing Flash Fiction

By Denise Ganley

Here are thirteen specific tricks (and a writing exercise) about how to write flash fiction (including insanely short stories).*

1. Take out all unnecessary words.

Practice on Twitter. I kid you not, and I speak from experience. Nothing shows you how to whittle down a sentence to the key elements better than Twitter. Pretend you only get one single solitary tweet to get the idea across. Can you do it?

Try this writing exercise and redo this sentence:

Pretend you only get one single solitary tweet to get the idea across convey your idea.

Pretend you only get one tweet to convey your idea.

Look, I just saved 3 words by editing that sentence. That’s GOLD in flash. It adds up, people!

2. You don’t need all those adjectives and adverbs. See More . . .