Starting a new hobby or picking up a new skill of any kind is difficult. There are basic concepts to pick up, strategies for success to consider, and — potentially worse — plenty of people willing to offer advice of questionable use.
Writing a short story certainly isn’t an exception to any of this.
One way turn your strong start into ongoing success is to start small. This doesn’t mean lowering your expectations or your standards for yourself, but to acknowledge your beginner status and focus on discreet, achievable steps that will eventually lead to your goal. (Remember those SMART goals from lesson 1?)
These blog posts is designed around the principle that small successes can be reinforcing and lead to bigger successes, so we aren’t going to be starting out by writing an epic fantasy novel. Instead, we’re going to start small with flash fiction — a form of fiction also known as a “short short story.”
Flash will give you a constraint, a goalpost to aim for as you write, which I find is often helpful in sparking creativity in fiction and poetry alike. (Maybe this isn’t a surprising insight from me, since most of my poetry is haiku.)
Of course, practically speaking, starting small is also good for morale boosts: it’s easier to finish a very short story than it is to finish a very long one.
What is Flash Fiction?
Flash fiction is a term used for very short stories.
Also called short short stories, sudden fiction, or a half-dozen other things, the exact definition of flash fiction varies. In speculative fiction, most magazines use the term to refer to short stories of between 500 and 1,000 words. Literary magazines tend to have a broader definition, sometimes as high as 2,000 words, while some places add other constraints such as the use of non-traditional narrative structures. In most cases, though, the number of words in a piece of flash fiction is between 500 and 1,500 words, and the structure of the piece doesn’t matter.
There are also specific subcategories of flash fiction:
- Drabble – A short story of exactly 100 words
- Twitterature – 280 characters (the length of a post on Twitter)
- Micro-fiction – Exact length varies, but usually anything up to 200 words
- Minisaga – 50 words
- Six-word story – Does what it says on the tin (Note: Hemingway didn’t write the one about baby shoes)
Just because flash fiction is very short doesn’t mean it can’t be very good.
Good flash fiction tells a complete story, and is like a lightning bolt from a clear sky, surprising with its dramatic abruptness and leaving a lasing impression. Indeed, a very short story can even win awards. Rachel Swirsky’s “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” published in Apex Magazine in 2013, is just under 1,000 words long but still won the Nebula Award offered by SFWA and was a finalist for the Hugo and World Fantasy awards—two other major genre awards.
Good flash is a lightning bolt from a clear sky, surprising, abrupt, and leaving a lasing impression.
In the literary world as well, there are authors famous for their skill at the short short story. Yasunari Kawabata, for example, received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968. Although the award committee mentioned his novels as driving their selection, Kawabata also wrote over 140 “palm-of-the-hand stories” throughout his life, some as short as a page.
With its low word-count and equal potential for powerful story-telling, flash fiction can be a good starting place for newer writers — although of course the brevity of flash doesn’t mean it’s easier to write a short short story well, as such. Flash is also convenient if you’re really busy and can’t spend many hours a day on writing. Even if you’re an accomplished writer, a full-length short story can take weeks — months! — to finish to your satisfaction, and you necessarily need to pay more attention to tying up all your loose ends in 10,000 words than in 1,000.
Full disclosure: I might be a bit biased in my opinions about flash.
I’ve written and published a lot of flash fiction (including my first professional sale), and it’s a form I always enjoy. It’s a fun challenge to try and tell a complete story in a thousand words, to pare down what’s on the page to exactly what you need an nothing more.
As we’ll see later, you can also get away with structural things in flash fiction that are harder to pull off in a longer short story. You don’t have to stick to the traditional Western three act structure, although you certainly can stick to that structure, if you like. It’s certainly a familiar structure to anyone who’s had to analyze a short story in a high school or college class, and there’s a lot to be said for familiarity when trying something new.
If you’d like to branch out, though, there are many other ways to write a story. We’ll talk about those later, though. For now, let’s briefly review what a story is.
The Basics of Short Story Writing
What is a short story, anyway?
There are many different ideas about what a short story should do. A lot of it depends on context, and of course in different cultures storytelling serves different purposes. For the purposes of this post, let’s say that a short story is a piece of fiction of under 7,500 words that shows a character or characters trying to do something, learning something about themselves in the process.
That is, to be fair, a terrible definition and one that doesn’t apply to some of my favourite stories. But for our purposes here, it’ll do!
A short story is a piece of fiction of under 7,500 words that shows a character or characters trying to do something, learning something about themselves in the process.
Most Western conceptions of the short story use something like the chart above, with an exposition that introduces the conflict, setting, and characters, a period of rising action that leads to a crisis, where the main character (protagonist) must decide how to act to resolve a specific problem or problems in the story’s climax. Not every short story follows this pattern, but enough do that you can probably think of a story you’ve read recently in these terms.
For example, in my story “At the Edge of a Human Path,” the first scene introduces the main character (K, a shapeshifting fox), the setting (ancient Japan), and hints at the conflict (K vs her mother). The next few scenes deepen our understanding of these three things, showing K acting to try and accomplish her goal in the story (convincing her mother to stop the Yamato from destroying the countryside rather than encouraging them to do worse) while also introducing new setting details and another character (Soga no Yoshitsuki, the warrior her mother has sent for her to entrap).
Towards the mid-point of the story, K has experienced her crisis point and decided that if her mother won’t act responsibly she must be removed. The tension continues to rise as she works towards this new goal, and in the climactic scene she and Soga no Yoshitsuki succeed in driving her mother out of the Yamato. In the final short scene, the story’s conflict is resolved, as K decides she will stay and guide the Yamato people away from their destructive habits to a lifestyle that respects the natural world.
Other people like to talk about a successful story containing “try/fail” cycles. In this conception of storytelling, the main character’s continued struggles to achieve their goal are what drive the plot. K first tries to convince her mother to return to beign a fox. When that fails, she keeps watch and consults a kami before trying again. It’s only after her first two failures that she changes her goal, and tries to convince Soga no Yoshitsuki to help her drive her mother away. This time, she succeeds, and the story’s main conflict is resolved.
There are many other ways of understanding a story, including the Japanese idea of kishōtenketsu, which uses a four-part structure:
- Ki (起) – The introduction of the story setting, characters, etc.
- Sho (承) – Additional development of the ideas introduced, with no major twists or changes
- Ten (転) – The “turn” or twist, where an unexpected development appears
- Ketsu (結) – The conclusion, which follows logically from the turn and brings the story to a close
A lot of people define kishotenketsu as “stories without conflict,” but that isn’t really accurate. It’s just that the conflict isn’t necessarily what drives the story — as opposed to Western ideas like the try/fail cycle and the three-act, rising-tension-and-climax model.
There are plenty of other ideas about narrative form and structure, as well. Jo-ha-kyu is a three-part conception often used in traditional Japanese drama, with the idea that a play should start slowly, speed up, and resolve rapidly. Aristotle suggested a play should be split into two parts: “complication and unravelling.”
Etcetera, etcetera.
Writing a Character Driven Short Story
On Codex, an online writing workshop and community for speculative fiction writers, one of my favourite answers I got to the question of “What is the poitn of a short story?” was from writer Addison Smith, who suggested the simple, yet compelling: “Feels over coffee.”
That is: a short story should make you feel something, but be short enough that you can finish it in about the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee.
The idea of feels over coffee leads neatly into a discussion of character driven stories. A character driven story is one that focuses on character growth and change, rather a plot driven story where the focus is on events that happen. You might consider a plot driven story to be an action movie, with thrills and explosions a plenty, while a character driven story is a play in a theatre — the characters, not the events, occupy the metaphorical central stage.
Character driven stories can be very compelling, because they let you experience what life might be like for other people. They can build empathy and understanding, and honestly I just find it a lot more interesting to read about people than a string of explosions. (Michael Baybamsplosions!)
It’s an oversimplification, of course, to say that a story is either character driven or plot focused. It’s very hard to write a successful short story with only plot or character growth.
For flash fiction especially, though, “feels over coffee” isn’t a bad place to end up. So how do we make sure our feels hit home?
Character Arcs
A story’s plot is the changes that happen to the setting of the story. The character arc is a series of changes that happens to the character themselves.
Although “character arc” is the standard term for this, I like to think of character development as a helix, a three-dimensional spiral rather than a flat series of curves or a simple vertical increase. In a story, the character often returns to the same (external) struggle, but things have changed inside them; they’re not quite the same person they were. They’re able to see the problem from a different perspective, and that makes a huge difference that allows them to accomplish their goal.
Think of a spiral staircase: even though you’ve walked in a circle, you’ve reached a new level of the building at the same time.
You can also think of character arcs in terms of Classical Drama. In Classical Tragedy, the main characters have a fatal flaw — something that they can never overcome despite their struggles. The final act of a tragedy, because of this, usually ends in the character’s death or something even worse. The same happens in modern-day genres such as horror, where characters often stay the same and are ultimately unsuccessful in overcoming their struggle as a result.
Classical Comedy, on the other hand, has a happy ending. Misunderstandings are cleared up, the characters figure things out, and — at least stereotypically — everything ends in a wedding. Obviously, modern short stories don’t have to end in weddings. It’s probably not the best idea to even try. All the same, a character’s success at achieving their goal and clearing up the story’s conflict is usually a result of their changed understanding of themselves, rather than just trying harder and thinking more about the rules of their world.
What gives the best short stories their emotional impact, in other words, is the “arc” of a character’s growth. We see people learn and change (or not), and that affects us emotionally, because we’ve been invited into their heads and feel a connection with them.
Remember: feels over coffee.
Flash 101
Flash fiction is just a very short story. That means you want to try and do similar things but in less space.
Practically speaking, though, this isn’t useful advice. Here’s some that’s hopefully better.
Four Questions for Effective Flash
One way to look at flash is to think of it as a story that answers four questions in order:
- What conflict does your protagonist want to resolve?
- What does your protagonist do about it?
- What happens as a result?
- What is the resolution?
If you like telling stories in a straightforward way, with a beginning, middle, and end, you can fit each of these questions into 250 words a piece and end up with a 1,000 word story.
You can also get away, many times, with just implying some of the questions. By telling part of a story, you can show that there’s a world beyond the page, and engage your readers by letting them figure out what happens next.
What does a story look like when you only imply the conflict? When you spend 750 words describing your protagonist’s struggle but only hint at the resolution? Because flash is so short, these can also be successful strategies.
Non-Traditional Narratives
One fun thing to do with flash is experiment.
Forget “three act structure!” Break out of traditional narrative conventions altogether.
Tell a story as a list of bullet points, as a series of tweets, as a set of GPS coordinates. An AMA on Reddit.
By playing with structure in this way, you can simultaneously break up a story into many small scenes and give yourself tight wordcounts while still showing a larger story.
That said, you still need to tell a story, not just show off a clever list of things. Using your experimental structure as headers, with more traditional narrative in between each, is one way to do this. The story linked above, Laura Pearlman’s “I am Graalnak of the Vroon Empire, Destroyer of Galaxies, Supreme Overlord of the Planet Earth. Ask Me Anything,” is a great example of this. Even though it’s just comments on a website, by the end of it we understand that an intergalactic conflict has been resolved.
You certainly can tell an effective story with nothing more than a list of items, but it’s a lot harder. Alex Acks’s“List of Items in Leather Valise found on Welby Crescent” is one story that does this very well.
Subtle Patterns
Another flash shortcut is to look for patterns in nature or other kinds of art, and fit your story into them. Patterns are literally everywhere, so they can give you a boost if you’re stuck. (The technical term for this is ekphrasis.)
This technique works best when the pattern you choose actually relates to the story you’re telling.
A good example is Takamichi Okubo’s “Shinbu Unit 99,” the form of which mimics a haiku: five paragraphs, then seven paragraphs, then five paragraphs. Eleanor R. Wood’s “Fibonacci” uses the mathematical sequence of the same name, starting each paragraph with the next number in the pattern.
Description and Detail in Flash Fiction
Gustav Flaubert supposedly said, “Three details are enough to fix a strong picture in the reader’s mind — if they are the right details.”
In flash fiction, you don’t have the wordcount to spend 500 words describing the origins and history of a dress, but you can say it was eggshell yellow, ankle-length, and tattered, giving the reader a clear picture of it that helps them “see” your story’s world.
To find the “right” details, focus on your viewpoint character (if there is one) or the person central to your story. What are the details that are most important to this character? What do they notice, and why?
The right details will not just describe your setting, they’ll tell your reader about your character’s struggle, making it much more moving and memorable.
Three Signs of Ineffective Flash Fiction
In his management book Three Signs of a Miserable Job, Patrick Lencioni describes how anonymity, irrelevance, and immeasurability can be warning signs for miserable employees. We can look at those same three things to figure out some potential things to avoid in flash fiction:
- Anonymity: It’s hard to relate to a character in a short story if we don’t know something about who they are.
- Irrelevance: If something isn’t relevant to your plot, character, or setting, it will distract your readers.
- Immeasurability: If the main character of a story isn’t trying to do something and doesn’t grow as a person, readers may wonder why they’re reading about them. (Think character arcs!)
Obviously, you can write great flash that has all three of these elements. But it’s harder!
Convservely, if you’re writing a piece of flash fiction that tells a story about a specific character who tries to achieve specific goals, and if you focus on what’s important to that character and those goals, readers will be able to feel your feels that much more easily.
Assignment: Write a Piece of Flash Fiction
Now that we’ve talked about what makes a short story work — and flash fiction in particular — here’s your assignment for the week.
- Write the first draft of a short story that’s 500 to 1,000 words long.
- Don’t submit it anywhere.
Hopefully, you’ve been able to stick to your schedule (If not, that’s okay! Try again!) and have been spending some time every day writing or thinking about writing.
This week, we’re going to use that schedule to start writing more purposefully, with the goal of a finished short story that’s between 500 and 1,000 words — the wordcount most often associated with flash fiction. If you’re feeling ambitious, you can write more, but try not to set a goal above 1,500 words maximum. You want that word-count constraint to guide your creativity, and you’re also more likely to finish a 500 word story than a 5,000 word one, especially if it’s the first thing you’ve tried to write.
The second part of this assignment is counter-intuitive.
What’s the point of an assignment that tells you not to do something? I’ll talk more about my reasons for this in future lessons, but the short version is that my approach to writing and submitting fiction works better when you have more than one story you can send out. I also find it’s easier to revise stories (and make them better!) when you let them sit for a while.
So after you do write your assignment, don’t try to sell it right away. Set it aside in a drawer or file folder and just let it turn over in the back of your mind. If you haven’t used up your entire week’s worth of writing time, start something new! It’s even better to have two finished short stories than to have one.
[Previous Lesson: Start Strong on Your Fiction Writing Practice]