That’s Tight: A Brief Lesson on Flash Writing

By Chelsey Clammer

It was nineteen years ago, when I was just twenty-one years old, that I kissed my dead father’s cold, gray, practically ashy forehead goodbye in a hospital in Austin. (29 words)

Cool sound there, but there’s the fact of unnecessary words. How you can try to fit an entire story in one sentence, but when you’re writing a flash piece, that fluffed narrative sentence takes away from the power of your writing. With flash, you have to accomplish exactly what the genre is as...