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I just tried writing my first flash fiction. Flash is a story that is typically under 1000 words, but I have read that some people consider anything under 2500 words flash fiction. A while ago I tried writing a drabble, that’s a story exactly 100 words in length. Here’s something that might seem counterintuitive. Writing short is very hard.
The story I wrote is less than 750 words, but I made sure that it had as many parts of a story as I could cram in there. There are defined characters, a goal, stakes, and a twist ending that seems obvious in retrospect. You know, story stuff.
Packing any of that into 750 words is really tricky. This post is more than 400 words and I am only telling you about the story. I write outlines longer than 750 words.
Flash fiction seems to be a popular format. Easily devoured by readers during a break or on their phone, but still long enough to deliver a compelling tale. I see a lot of other writers selling them. I don’t know if I’m going to be among them. It’s just really hard. I function better with a bit of room to breath. I often find getting under 5000 words to be difficult.
The obvious question would be, if it’s hard and I like writing longer stories, why try writing a flash story. The obvious, and correct answer, would be why not. You don’t learn anything by not trying.
I think I will try a few more in the coming weeks. I will probably find that I need to expand these stories quite a lot before I feel happy with them. On the upside, it seems to only take a day or two to write a 750 word story. That’s a far cry from the weeks or months that I spend on my more than 5000 word stories. To be perfectly clear though, it might be a small word count and a short time, but it does feel much more difficult than writing a longer story.
Unfortunately, like always, I won’t be posting them here, unless I really can’t see any way to sell them. I would like to. I would rather just post up anything that I write, but that doesn’t seem to be the way the publishing world works.
Until it does, I suppose you will just have to be satisfied with these vague descriptions of what I am writing.
Hopefully, in the near future, I can let you know about actual published stories I may or may not have coming out.

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