Ratika Deshpande
I love flash narratives and this is an appeal from me to you to write more flash fiction and flash nonfiction. The form came into existence long before attention spans and short-form content entered our daily vocabularies and I believe it’ll have value in the future as well. For flash (usually defined as a piece of writing of fewer than 1,000 words, going as short as six words) is not just about quick consumption or using fewer words—it’s about using the right words effectively. Brevity—saying a lot by saying very little—is the key here. Flash is about creating a vivid image, a moment that feels alive, a story that reaches straight to the core.
Of course, this requires greater skill than usual because the number of words you have is limited. But that, among the following other reasons, is exactly why I believe more people should write flash narratives.
Firstly, they’re excellent for doing quick, deliberate practice. Novels are long-term projects and, unless you’re a full-time writer with loads of writing time every day, it’s difficult to fit even short stories into one’s daily routine. Flash narratives are just short enough to allow you to get some practice even on the busier days. At the average typing speed of 40 words per minute, a 1,000-word story needs less than 30 minutes of your time.
Of course, writing is not typing; you need ideas—prompts for nonfiction, a plot for fiction. That’s where the benefit of flash’s constraint comes in. With such a little, doable word count, it’s easier to get started—and, more importantly, get finished. Set a timer, pick a prompt, and start writing.
Flash is a low-risk form in this sense, because you only need 30 minutes to try something new, to take a plunge and see if a premise, a character, a place, is working for you—a considerably faster process than doing such experimenting through a longer project.
This is a blessing, especially for perfectionists like me—get in and get going. “DON’T THINK!” Ray Bradbury famously advised writers, warning against slow writing and intellectualizing the process. Worry about the quality later—first, get the story down on the page. Doing so through flash is an excellent approach because you can start and finish a piece in a single sitting.
This also means that overall, you’ll be able to finish more pieces. The more pieces you finish, the more opportunities you’ll have to experiment with different styles and genres—I’ve tried writing book reviews, humor, fairy tale retellings, romances using this method and ended up surprising myself quite often. The word limit, along with any prompts that you pick (and a timer) turn writing into play, where you’re challenging yourself to do something new and unexpected on the page. And because you’re working fast, because you’re not (over)thinking, doubting yourself, it’s easier for your creativity to burst forth onto the page.
And if you’re still not sure about the resulting work, then flash also makes it easier to get quick feedback—it takes very little time to read short pieces and therefore demands much less work from the person giving the feedback. Those of us who’ve sent our stuff to others for their comments know how often the other person promises to get back soon but is most often not able to. With flash, this problem is reduced to a considerable degree.
You don’t have to give up on your bigger projects to start writing flash. As William Zinsser suggests in this article on writing memoirs, you can get started on your bigger work by breaking it down into smaller parts. Rarely is real life like a novel, after all—it’s more a series of anecdotes, and flash is an excellent way to capture that.
Zinsser advises writing one short episode on Monday, another on Tuesday, and so on. Eventually, you’ll have your draft.
“Then,” he says, “one day, take all your entries out of their folder and spread them on the floor. (The floor is often a writer’s best friend.) Read them through and see what they tell you and what patterns emerge.” After that, “all you have to do is put the pieces together.”
And this can work for fiction too. Consider The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, which is structured as a series of vignettes and Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, which is a short story collection disguised as a novel.
Finally, writing a lot of flash narratives allows us to practice writing briefly, with impact. Brevity requires clarity—clarity of description, clarity of thought. And those are two features of a text that are essential in works of any length and genre—because they make every word count.
Bio: Ratika Deshpande is a writer from India. Her work has appeared in Authors Publish, Reactor Magazine, the Brevity Blog, and other platforms.
