Flash-Fiction: Practice Makes Perfect Personified

Flash Fiction: My Weekly/Daily Practice

    As someone who is getting back into writing, flash fiction/short-short stories have been great way for me to hone my craft. A thousand words to tell your story, even if it does not match the requirements, allows you to be creative, and forces you to cut fat and fluff off the main idea. As someone who wants to write in fantasy and science-fiction, where having too much fat is a possibility, forcing myself to remove that fat and other extraneous bits is necessary, and flash fiction is a great exercise in doing so.

    There are other benefits to writing a flash fiction piece.

    If a story does not fit within a thousand words or so? Awesome, I have a new short story idea to write and publish in the future. The investment of time in flash-fiction is minimal (at least for the first draft) on my part yet gives me some much in creative thinking and brainstorming, which author's sometimes have.

    Indeed, the point of these pieces is to not create something instantaneously profitable, although that would be nice. It is to get my creatives juices flowing and moving again. With larger pieces such as novellas and novels, the marathon pace of writing them means it is easy to taper of the longer they go. So going into a different story from the main piece, helps me get enthusiastic about writing again. Even a hundred word vignette could probably start me up and help moving along with my main piece easily. Currently, my first novella in the Ishtar setting is being helped along by jumping of into other, smaller pieces of fiction to give myself creative rejuvenation.

    It could not be underestimated how much the completion of a story helps me in push forward with my creative endeavors. It honestly reminds me of the novel, I closest to ever came to completing. It was built around building vignettes that built up the story and eventually I would have come back to tie it all back together.

    I stop working on that story because I found the plot....shit. The plot was shit. Motivations were terrible and made no sense. The characters were uninspired and one dimensional. It is one of those stories that, if I were to complete it, would be stuffed in a drawer and never brought out again. However, that is beside the point.

    Writing flash fiction is something that I recommend to writer's stuck in blocks and creative slumps. Something to break the monotony of a longer piece. 

    Also yes, I wrote two blog posts in one month. It is a miracle.