Is there a recipe for writing successful flash?
By Heather Sellers
I love reading flash essays—true stories that fit on a page or two, the shorter the better. I love how they often work as double-duty shapeshifters, serving as both stand-alone pieces and parts of an arc in larger narratives. I’m thinking here of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling, A. Van Jordan’s M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, and Abigail Thomas’s Safekeeping. It’s like having a pile of gorgeous photographs, wonderful in their own right, that also spring to life as a film.
These small, honed pieces are delicious to read. Something about their brevity seems to make them not only inviting to fall into, but extra memorable.
But writing flash essays and micro memoir is maddeningly, shockingly difficult. One needs to have the skills of a talented, experienced poet—a gift for compression, metaphor, language, syntax, and powerful voltas —along with the story-telling chops of a gifted prose writer. I’ve watched myself and my students struggle to figure out the secret sauce: Why do some flash pieces sing, while others seem flat, lifeless, both too much and not enough?
Can we develop a taxonomy or recipe for writing successful flash? Or is this kind of work like photography—you simply have to take 100 or 1000 shots to get one great image?
Pitfalls abound, and most of them are familiar as things that plague all of our writing.
If the piece is about what it’s about, it’s probably game over.
If something isn’t happening off the page, the reader will probably not engage deeply enough.
If there’s not a turn of some kind–a twist, a surprise, a reversal, an insight, something that happens— the piece remains an anecdote, not a story. If there’s no flash, it’s not flash.
Many wonderful micro memoirs are created by collage, or from lists, or pure dialogue. This is a wily form. It all comes down to the flash— an event you make happen in your reader’s brain as they read your piece. It’s an aha, a realization, a knowing that was, until we read the piece, secret in us, and now it’s illuminated, awake, and we have it. And it’s quick. There’s not a paragraph of processing, a long passage of reflection, or any kind of explanation. The flash is an experience created by words, but it doesn’t live in the words. I think that’s why these pieces are so popular. It’s all about the reader, and the writer’s work, like the magician’s, is completely invisible, unseen by the viewer.
There are techniques we can practice to conjure flash. In my experience, practicing writing these kinds of pieces in a sequence produces the best results; I usually have to write ten of them to get one that has some kind of spark, some potential combustion. And, I have to focus, deeply, on what is just out of view. It’s not about writing what you know, it’s more a leaning into vulnerability and tiny details, and seeing what comes forward.
Here are some of the techniques I use to generate flash essays.
Work within strict limits : one page, or exactly 250 words. One-word titles, right justified margins. Set up your rules so you have a nice tight boundary to work within. Stick to the rules ruthlessly.
Write in a series . My previous collection, Field Notes from the Flood Zone , began as a series of micros, each one drawn from the observations in my daybook, what I see and overhear and do in each day. Writing during the pandemic, most of my days were spent staring out my window at the street and walking around in my garden. The isolation I experienced in 2020 powerfully amplified my hunger for company and heightened my powers of observation—I have never watched plant and animal life so closely, ever. I created a piece every day for many months. I’ve created series based on a single word, and another series prompted by skirts I’ve owned, for example. Letting go of the pressure of the one-off allows you to delve into your subject matter, and to simply practice capturing what’s ineffable in a moment.
Cut and cut again. In my experience, flash is an analog form. I draft my pieces by hand. I type them up, print them out, and then cut the piece in half, and then often in half again. Print, rinse, and repeat. I have to see the words on the physical page and be able to move them around. It’s not so much a writing project, creating flash, as it is sleight of hand, a taking-away.
Read aloud . I’m trying to get things on the page that will make things happen off the page. This requires a superpower: bilocation. You have to be in the piece and in the reader’s head at the same time. When my ear takes it in, my brain has a better sense of what the reader is going to absorb. My ear is my best editor: most of what I write does not need to be on the page. Thank you, Ear!
Find your process for setting out these lines, creating these little beauty traps, and allowing the reader to assemble the project mentally in their own space. It’s the coolest thing. Ever.
I would love to hear your tricks and techniques for composing successful flash.
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Heather Sellers directs the MFA program in creative writing at the University of South Florida. Her most recent book is Field Notes from the Flood Zone. Writing flash, or want to? Join Heather for her webinar, Write Tight: Creating Compelling Flash Fiction and Micro Memoir April 19th at 2PM Eastern time (replay will be available).
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