When I first decided to write flash, I had little idea of what I was doing. The stories I read were short and often I found their meaning elusive. I was intrigued by their brevity, as I had just entered a MFA program and was working on short stories. I could do flash on the side!

So, I started out writing short stories but I cut them short(er.) Or, I’d take long passages and remove sentences to meet the word count. Every word counted insofar as it had a grammatical place in its respective sentence. The sentences flowed into each other.

Thus, I thought I was writing flash.

I was wrong.What I was doing was writing potential short stories, not flash. Just as my bicycle’s deflated inner tube will fit in my pocket, my stories fit into their respective word counts. Yet, just like the inner tube, the stories were unusable and thus unused.

I had to realize that flash fiction is a separate entity from short stories. Sure, the two often exist in the same space. Stuart Dybek’s “The Coast of Chicago” is an excellent example of flash and the short story co-existing in perfect harmony. Yet, they are separate.

Flash’s chief characteristic is its compression and its liberty to move towards poetry. At times, it may be hard to distinguish between prose poetry and flash. Conversely, at times, flash may have a narrative arc which so resembles a short story that you will question my judgment.

This sort of definition and approach allows the writer to be free of word-count constraints. For instance, I would consider Tobias Wolff’s “A Bullet in the Brain” to be a flash. Wolff’s story is basically a set-up and then a flashback through a man’s life while a bullet sears through his brain. Here, Wolff uses the flashback to achieve compression, to flash this man’s life for the reader while the bullet blazes through his grey matter. Wolff focuses so tightly on this man and his life, now ended, that we don’t need to count words to call this story a flash.

So, when I want or need to write a flash fiction, I try to keep this idea of compression in mind. Now, sometimes a character or scenario or emotion just doesn’t fit in a flash fiction. This is fine and I’ve learned the hard way to let a piece grow to its proper length. I’ve also learned to take those longer pieces and break them down to their DNA and provide the reader with an essential element. If I do my job and compress this element hard enough, the reader will find a diamond and more layers of meaning will expand in her mind, while the words on the page will be few and select.

Since I’m not much for prompts, I do seek a trajectory to guide my work. So, here are the four main trajectories I tend to use when writing flash:

Narrative – try to focus solely on a narrative. Eliminate as much excess description and exposition as possible. Tell just the story. If you compress it tightly enough, the rest will come bubbling to the surface.
Image – find an image and use your laser beam intensity to give it context and meaning.
Character – that guy who used to live next door to you when you were ten? The chimerical character you just imagined? Lets’ see her and only her. More than a sketch, this sort of flash does require some action to illuminate the character.
Emotion – What exemplifies a particular emotion? What sort of scenario brings it to the surface. Perhaps it’s a confluence of complimentary and conflicting emotions which bubble up. This is a tricky one which will borrow from the other three, but try to keep the emotion at the forefront – everything else is in its service.

So, there it is: N.I.C.E. How quaint and perfect, eh?

Remember, flash is not a short story. If you find yourself writing backstory and explication, you probably need to write a short story. This is fine. However, if you find that somehow your raw material isn’t moving along, that you can’t leave a particular image or emotion, you might have a flash on your hands. Listen to your instincts, they are trying to tell you something.

At the end of the day, we are dealing with art. We are artists and as such we are live in the world of the ephemeral and transitory. There are no rules. But, if we have general trajectories to follow, we just might create something worthy of the place from whence it came.

Good luck & Happy writing.

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Hobie Anthony is a writer living in Portland Oregon. A May 2010 graduate of Queens University-Charlotte’s low-residency MFA program, he can be found in a variety of online and print journals. Hobie is easily suckered by cheesy Hollywood movies. Hobie blogs at http://redneckzen.blogspot.com.