Prompt #55 — Write Like James R. Tomlinson

Tomlinson tells this complex story (view here) primarily in dialog. This isn’t often successfully done, but Tomlinson pulls it off by recalling some of the speech through summary and by interspersing the dialog with bits of detail and other information.  This piece could easily be longer, but he chooses to leave only the bare minimum in this moment between these two men.

PROMPT

Find a story you’ve written that is not a flash fiction piece. Consider the story’s most basic elements, the crux of it, and then change something—change your character’s gender or ethnicity, make the character unlike yourself, or perhaps change the setting to a place you are unfamiliar with. Use this change to reposition your character or narrator within your story, and then try to rewrite it as a flash piece.

What elements end up falling away? How does your change in character, scenery, or whatever, enlarge, or heighten certain elements of your narrative that you hadn’t focused on before?