Flash fiction.  The opportunity to tell an entire story in 1,000 words or less.  Exciting challenge or special form of torture?  In January of this year, I honestly thought I would never be able to manage the trick of it, but I when I was presented with the opportunity to join a challenge to write one flash fiction per week for five weeks in a row I jumped in, because I never found a challenge that I could resist.

That’s when I discovered that writing good flash is even harder than I had feared.  It’s easy to write a scene, an opening, a character sketch, but a story that short?  With character development, setting, plot, and still managing to throw some voice in there for good measure?

I completed the challenge.  In the process, I received oodles of comments about what I was producing, which helped clarify what needed to be addressed, and I also read a huge number of pieces that really worked.  Seeing how much can be done in a piece of flash fiction was inspiring.

I also learned a lot about the necessity of picking your words very carefully meticulously.  See!  I just saved a word and made a more concrete statement!  This is a lesson that can be applied to writing in all shapes and sizes.  Flash is just the Hunger Games arena where words battle each other for supremacy and survival.

I look forward to writing more flash in the future, and in the meantime, one of the pieces I wrote during that challenge, Three Red Roses, sold to Every Day Fiction and was published at the end of June.

Flash is an exciting opportunity.  An opportunity to hone your word-smithing skills.  An opportunity to test your limits.  Most of all, it’s an opportunity to tell a story.

I’m interested in how many here have written flash.  How do you like it?  Alternatively, who here reads flash?  What sorts of things do you enjoy in your bite-size fiction?  Are there any particular stories that stood out to you as exceptional?