STATE OF FLASH
Flash fiction reminds me of my childhood fascination with paleontology and archeology. I loved how, from just a chip of stone or a few improbable…
There are twelve students in each flash fiction workshop I teach at Emerson College in Boston. What is very different about this class in contrast…
Through exercise, through activity, direct the writer’s eye and mind: the entire world as structure. Not Freytag, not three act, not two realist characters, enter…
When I teach flash fiction I like to guide my students by using great stories already written as models. I do this through a series…
On Top Chef, Wolfgang Puck had the contestants cook an omelet. A plain one, just egg and butter and cream. Salt and pepper. There isn’t…
Though often left out of workshop conversations, those ubiquitous constraints known as word counts have been influencing fiction writers far more than they let on,…
I’m 45 feet off the ground, strapped into a harness on a molded indoor climbing wall. Even though the only reason I’m up here is…
So you’re going to try your hand at this flash fiction thing, huh? In the beginning you will still very often land closer to the…
Two of America’s best-known microfictions are poems, written by poets—Forche’s “The Colonel” and Hass’s “Story of the Body”—but both read like fiction, and are presented…
Writers of flash work the rules in various ways, sometimes compressing traditional narrative to create thumbnails of larger, longer tales, all the needed elements rendered…