A Story I Had to Unlearn: How Flash Fiction Changed My Writing

Flash fiction is everywhere lately.

At least, I’m seeing it much more often than ever before. Not as a sudden trend, exactly, but as a steady presence that keeps surfacing in places where writing lives. It shows up on Substack, in literary magazines, writing competitions, and even on social media.

The term “flash fiction” is a relatively recent development. It gained traction in the 1990s, though the form has been around much longer, appearing under names like “short-short stories” or “sudden fiction.” (Not to age myself, but I began college in the late ’90s, and I remember my professors still referring to it as short-short fiction back then.) So, what feels new is not the form, but the attention it’s receiving now, by both writers and readers.

Flash teaches you a different way of building pressure, and a unique way of carrying a story.

I keep coming across pieces that take only a minute or two to read, yet often, to my delight, seem to hold more than their size suggests. I’ve also started writing flash fiction recently, but before I did, I often thought of this kind of writing as constrained. Smaller in scope, maybe even easier. But the more I read and write it, the more that assumption has started to fall apart. What I’m seeing instead is compression, not constraint. Flash teaches you a different way of building pressure, and a unique way of carrying a story. The form has pulled me in more than I expected.

For a long time, I think I absorbed the idea that shorter fiction was somehow less demanding. That if you had fewer words, you had less to manage. To me, that meant less room for complexity, which led to lower stakes and less interesting stories. It felt like a form you might try on the way to something larger, rather than something to take seriously on its own terms.

And yet, the more I’ve been sitting with these pieces, the more that assumption has started to feel backwards. There’s nowhere to hide in a piece of flash fiction. No space for excess words or over-explaining. You cannot meander your way into meaning. Every word, every sentence has to carry weight, and the writer has to be skilled in using white space and inference. Flash stories aren’t built through accumulation in the same way. They’re built through precision, implication, and a reader’s willingness to bring their own imagination into the mix.

Flash stories aren’t built through accumulation in the same way. They’re built through precision, implication, and a reader’s willingness to bring their own imagination into the mix.

One of the most well-known examples of this kind of compression is the six-word story often attributed to Ernest Hemingway: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Only six words, and yet most readers don’t experience the story as small. It doesn’t tell us what happened, identify the speaker, or provide any backstory. Instead, it leaves space for the reader to make a series of quiet, devastating inferences. A significant loss is implied but never named. Context is withheld, but certainly not absent. What makes the piece work is not just what’s written, but what it allows the reader to supply—to imagine. The emotional weight of the story doesn’t live on the page. It’s created in the space between the words and the reader encountering them.

Here’s a micro fiction piece by Lydia Davis, originally published in Electric Literature:

“Worrying About Father’s Arm”

What’s striking about a piece like this is how gently it begins. How almost mundane the concern feels at first—a small discomfort, a passing worry. And then, in a single turn, everything shifts. The father is gone. The problem remains. The emotional weight of the story doesn’t arrive through explanation, but through recontextualization. What seemed minor becomes suddenly devastating. This is what flash fiction does so well. It doesn’t build meaning in a traditional sense. It allows meaning to surface, often after the fact, in the space held by the reader.

I enjoy flash fiction as a reader, but in a surprising twist, it’s done even more for me as a writer.

For most of my writing life, I told myself a version of this story: brevity is not my strength. I’m a novelist. I tend to think in extended, multi-layered scenes, and I love a slow emotional build in story. I like to develop deeply complicated characters, and I take my time doing it. Or, if I’m being honest, I can be a bit long-winded. (It’s okay to laugh at me—I am.)

So, I assumed that writing something short—something as compressed as flash—was simply outside my range. Not because I hadn’t tried it, but because I had already decided it wasn’t where my strengths lived. I told people I wasn’t capable of writing a short story, let alone flash or micro fiction. It wasn’t until I found myself stuck in a writing rut that I decided, out of a bit of desperation, to try something new. On a whim, I entered my first 100-word, micro fiction competition, hosted by NYC Midnight. I didn’t expect much from it. Telling a complete story in 100 words or less? I was sure I’d be terrible at it. I certainly didn’t expect to enjoy it. But surprise, surprise—I did.

In flash and micro fiction, there’s no room for warm-up, zero space to ease your way into the heart of your story.

What surprised me most wasn’t just that I enjoyed it, but how quickly it changed the way I approached story craft. Writing micro fiction forced me to get to the point faster—much, much faster, like in the first sentence or two kind of fast. I was pushed to identify what the story was really about in the opening lines and build from there, rather than circling my way toward it or relying on character development to lead the way. In flash and micro fiction, there’s no room for warm-up, zero space to ease your way into the heart of your story. You have to push the reader into the center almost immediately, and then move quickly toward the ending—while still allowing the story to feel complete, but never rushed. I became more aware of how much I was relying on explanation in my longer fiction work, how often I was overbuilding and overtelling when a single, well-placed detail might have done just as much, or even more.

Flash sharpened my storytelling instincts. It taught me to cut sooner, leave more unsaid, and trust the reader to understand all that I wasn’t explaining. Most importantly, flash showed me that brevity isn’t the opposite of depth. Instead, it demands a different kind of precision—one that can carry just as much emotional weight.

As creatives, I think we too often decide (quietly and without much evidence) what we are and are not capable of as writers. Based on these fallacies, we can settle into a version of ourselves that feels fixed, even when it isn’t.

The more time I spend with flash and micro fiction, the more I see how much they ask of both the writer and the reader. They require a kind of attention that feels increasingly rare—an attention to language, to implication, and to what’s left unsaid. And while the novel is still my writing home, I’m thankful for what flash fiction continues to teach me about story craft, and I use those lessons in my novel writing.

As creatives, I think we too often decide (quietly and without much evidence) what we are and are not capable of as writers. Based on these fallacies, we can settle into a version of ourselves that feels fixed, even when it isn’t. Writing flash didn’t just give me a new form to experiment with—it disrupted a story I had been telling myself for years, decades.

And I wonder how many of us are carrying similar assumptions about our work. Maybe, that we’re not good at dialogue, we can’t write humor, or don’t know properly how to structure a plot. But what if those limitations aren’t about ability? What if it’s about limiting beliefs, exposure, or willingness? If you feel boxed in by your craft or have stories you tell yourself about what you can and cannot write, I challenge you to try something that feels slightly outside of reach, uncomfortable even. Don’t try to master it or worry that it won’t be perfect. Just try, and see what it might open up.