Less is More: How I Accidentally Became Obsessed With Flash

It’s never been a secret that I don’t see myself as a writer in a fundamental sense. It would be wrong to say that it’s a part of my fundamental ambitions or identity like it is for many other writers I know. For me, writing is a thing that people do, and it is a thing that anyone can do well. My personal observation is that most writers with something interesting to say never say it mostly because they don’t give themselves permission to start. That was how I first got into flash fiction.

I recently served as adjudicator for a flash fiction competition run by the Free Future Foundation. Within that remit, I was asked to submit a Judge’s Report on the ranking entries but given free rein on how I approached this, and if you care to read it, you can learn a little more about my personal philosophy of flash. Of course, I abused this freedom by spending over two thousand words saying my piece, and that was after very judicious editing. Before you ask, the irony is not lost on me that I wrote at length about a form of literature which literally requires nothing except being very short. Sue me, if it bothers you.

One of the reasons I did that is that I’ve recently achieved, fairly regularly, some recognition for my flash fiction work. As a result, this has engendered some curiosity from the people in my life who are otherwise not necessarily enmeshed in the writing community or particularly concerned with fiction outside the mainstream. What I tell them is that flash fiction has revealed itself to me as the ultimate exercise in honing one’s craft, and over time, I have come to see myself as a fervent advocate of it and the community around it.

While I won’t get into the details of it in full–and because I intend to delve into more detail on my thoughts, advice, and hopes more broadly in subsequent posts here–it is especially because I only stumbled into flash fiction by accident that I can personally vouch for its value. If you’ve ever thought you might like to write someday, or have wondered whether writing is something you might enjoy, then keep reading:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I turned to writing as a way to fill time that normally would be spent commuting or socialising. It was just something I could do and keep doing without needing to worry too much about the actual outcome because no-one would ever read it, and because it was a way of distracting myself from anxiousness. Of course, the pandemic came and went, and writing was no longer a crutch to repel intrusive thoughts: but having realised how much it calmed me and fulfilled me–being given free rein and being free from any outside opinion–I realised I wanted to carry on with it. In that sense, it was a hobby at first. That’s where flash came in.

I wanted to dedicate time to writing deliberately in my schedule, and I knew that I’d fuss excessively if my works were given indefinite deadlines. So, rather than letting my brain paralyse me with unattainable standards, I proactively committed myself to submitting for competitions. In particular, short stories and flash fiction competitions appealed. The deadlines are close, so you can’t obsess. The word counts are low, so you can’t be overwhelmed. That was the rationale, at least.

It all worked, of course: it was the unexpected experiences involved with my clever plan that actually turned out to be pivotal.

Let me put it this way:

At the very least, if you’ve ever had an interesting idea, you can write it down in around 300 words if you just stop fretting. The whole thing takes about 75 seconds to read for most people. At an average typing speed of 50 words per minute, you could bash out the entire thing in less time than it takes to empty the dishwasher. Viewed in this way, no-one has any excuse not to at least have a first draft of their idea. No-one’s asking for Crime and Punishment. In fact, I’m convinced almost nobody even actually enjoys reading Crime and Punishment. So there’s really nothing to lose.

This has the effect of breaking the psychological barrier to even getting started. If it helps you, it can be low-stakes, low-time, and low-complexity to just take something out of your brain and put it on paper.

The second phase is the more interesting one, particularly if you are interested in approaching your projects as a game. The restrictions of the word count mean you have to really probe over everything you leave in. It is the best possible way to become a better writer: every word needs to be deliberate, every omission needs to be meaningful despite absence. By constraining the field, you give yourself freedom to really develop a voice and skill set. If you do it often enough, I dare say you’ll even find yourself thinking (as I, recently, have been doing almost constantly) that you know if you put your mind to it, you can really polish and perfect something very short–and if you can do that, imagine if you let yourself write a full-length novel or playscript or short story where you steadily just produced a lengthier work as the sum of dishwasher-sized chunks.

The third is that by being so short, and therefore being so necessarily open-ended in terms of objective, flash lends itself well to making writing fun. Often, pieces that I finish started as a form of dare. For example, my work Why Do The Village Sunflowers Pray So Blindly To The Sun started as a bit of fun: I wanted to see how long I could make a single sentence run on for and still get away with it: I managed to reach eighty words, or about a quarter of the full story. These exercises, and flash itself, serve the same role as going to the gym and using a dedicated machine to work a single muscle group. There is freedom in being able to focus on a single objective, or single idea.

Given all of this, I think anyone who has even the slightest curiosity should explore flash. Even if you don’t intend to ‘be’ a writer, the act of producing flash will improve your writing skills and intellectual parsimony to the benefit of every aspect of your life without your even realising it. If you’re willing to explore its potential, then you’re going to discover that flash can achieve things no other form of writing can: because flash alone utilises the unsaid as the basis of its meaning. It requires the reader to make inferences and connections, it thrives on ambiguity and naturally lends itself to complexity of meaning. By necessity, it creates an intellectual dialogue between you and your audience. I’m not arrogant enough to assume I have any particular insights into the art of flash, but I dare say I’ve learned a thing or two in my time (or at least somehow fluked a fair amount of recognition!) and so I’m keen to publish my own philosophy of what makes good flash and how to approach it for newcomers. Look out for those in future posts.

In the meantime, let me advocate for flash fiction as a genre and as a community, and say that I think it deserves far more attention and support than it enjoys. There are comparatively fewer resources and discussions about flash fiction as a genre out there: I know that I personally would have liked more advice when I first started. All I can do now is try and make more of that discussion and advice for others, and contribute as much as I can to this quiet community full of diamonds in the rough.