Flash Forward: How to Use Flash Fiction to Grow Your Writing Muscles

One

The Beginning of my Love Affair with Flash Fiction

I’ve created stories for as long as I can remember. For a large part of my life, I did so with the dream of becoming a writer, though I had little idea of how to make that dream a reality. It wasn’t until 2010, with an unfinished rough draft in hand, that I joined a writing group. Once a week we met to draft, edit, and write flash fiction.

For months, I didn’t understand the point of flash fiction. Sure, it was short enough that we could each write a piece, read them out loud, and critique each other’s work, but otherwise, I couldn’t find the connection to the novels I wanted to be writing. However, I loved the group, and it was the one time each week I was guaranteed writing time.

Even though I didn’t see the point in writing flash fiction, I kept doing it. Partly because it was fun. I got to try new things, experiment with different techniques, and occasionally write something ridiculously silly. After several months of penning flash fiction, I noticed a difference in my writing and mindset when I sat down to work on my novel.

Since each flash fiction was its own thing, I would write it, get the excitement of finishing something, and then analyze it. At the meetings, it wasn’t uncommon for us to write two flash fictions, giving me that many opportunities to work on a skill and assess my efforts. When I didn’t like my first flash of the night, I tried to improve with my next one.

That differed greatly from my novel writing habit. When I worked on a novel, my goal was to write as much as I could that day. Once I finished writing, I’d do a little editing to clean up glaring mistakes, close the file, and think about what I wanted to write next. I wasn’t willing to consider analyzing my work until I’d finished the book for fear it would stop my writing efforts.

Which was why, when I joined the writing group with 50,000 words of dreck and another 50,000 words of an unfinished draft in hand, I’d hardly analyzed my own work at all. By my standard, I’d only gotten to the end—and therefore the looking-back stage—once. Since I analyzed the flash fiction as soon as I typed the last word, I was spending more time thinking critically about my writing than I ever had before. All that analysis changed my writing, helping me grow and develop skills I doubt I would have learned as quickly, or at all, had I not written all that flash.

Once I had this epiphany that consistent analysis on finite projects helped me develop skills in a way novels hadn’t at that point, I looked forward to writing flash fiction. It was a chance to try something, to examine my work less lovingly and more critically, and to challenge myself to do better. With every flash, my writing improved. I even moved from always writing independent flashes to using the flash fiction sessions as an opportunity to make my work multipurpose. I’d write a flash that could also be tucked into my current work in progress. I wrote chapters this way, one small flash at a time, analyzing each one as I went.

In the years since, I’ve written ten novels, a slew of short stories, and umpteen flash fictions. Some of those flash fictions are nothing more than fun. But every time I’ve written flash fiction, no matter how long or short, how fun or serious, I’ve learned something. In thirty minutes, I can learn if I would have to work very hard to write in a particular style. I can learn if an idea I had for a story will work or not. I can learn what point of view I want to use in a novel. And because of what I learned when I write flash fiction, I write better novels.

Many writers I talked to over the years don’t utilize flash fiction. Unlike short stories, I think flash fiction has a reputation for not having a great connection to novels. I think that reputation is undeserved, because in many ways, novels are created out of little pieces of flash fiction. Regardless of the connection between flash fiction and novels, flash fiction—more so than any other type of writing—is a novelist’s sandbox. It’s the place you go to test new ideas, grow skills, and be able to turn over attempts rapidly so you can analyze and grow. There is no other area of narrative storytelling that gives you that type of reward.

But before you can enjoy the benefits of flash fiction, we have to go back to the beginning...

Two

What is Flash Fiction?

If you don’t know what flash fiction is, you’re not alone. I didn’t know what flash fiction was until I’d been writing it for some time. Even then, when I went to look at the definitions, I was confused. If you hasten off to Google, you’ll find numerous explanations, many of which conflict. A great deal of the confusion about flash fiction’s identity relates back to the broad scope of things that fall under the umbrella of flash fiction. To simplify things, we’re going to use a definition that relates to how we want to use flash fiction and is one of the more all-encompassing definitions:

Flash fiction is any work ranging from 100 to 1,000 words in length that tells a story while implying a larger story exists around that work.

Let’s break that definition down further, starting with the word count range. It doesn’t matter what you write, be it flash fiction, short stories, novellas, novelettes, short novels, or novels, everyone has a slightly different idea of the word count range for these types of fiction. Since we’re focused on how flash fiction can help novelists, our breakdown will be simple. Above 1,000 words is short story territory. Below 1,000 words is flash fiction.

On the lower word count side, there are flash fiction styles that go all the way down to six words. That particular style is the six-word story, and while it’s incredibly challenging to convey powerful ideas in that space, it doesn’t directly help us build better long works.

Since we write long fiction, we want to look at the lengths of flash fiction that most help us build skills and build novels. From my experience, that range is the 100 to 1,000-word range. That space could be anything from a pivotal moment to a complete scene. This is our sweet spot, where we can practice skills and test ideas without committing excessive time to a project of unknown worth.

Now let’s focus on the second half of our definition of flash fiction: A work that tells a story while implying a larger story exists around what’s presented. Flash fiction should tell a story, which means there is character and story development. It should also leave space for questions so readers think about what happened before and after the flash.

Essentially, flash