Patience in Flash Fiction Writing by Allison Symes Given flash fiction is so short, is patience necessary? Surely you just dash off a couple of hundred words and send it off to a publisher or put it on your website. Hmm… no! Patience does pay off because flash fiction is precision writing. It takes time to get that right.
out the basics of what I need to know to be able to write the story up at all. For another, it also means I am far less likely to go off at an interesting but unhelpful tangent (and I suspect most writers have been there more times than they might care to admit).
One of the things I love most about flash fiction writing is I can set my characters whenever and wherever I want - and I do. I’ve always loved inventing people and long thought this was the best aspect to any story telling so this is win-win for me. As there is no room for much description, flash stories have to be character led so I outline what I need to know about “my people” (or other species of choice) before I write their stories up.
So I’ve got my character(s) lined up, now what do I do with them? Give them a decent plot line of course but often the character can dictate the plots they are likely to be in. So in outlining my characters I have often got them and my story structure in place in one “hit”.
And this is where the patience comes in. I have found patience at the outlining stage of writing saves me a lot of editing grief later. For one thing, there are no plot holes as I’ve already worked
So again time and patience exercised at this point pays off. I have rushed straight into a story twice in my time. Twice I abandoned stories. Definitely not a coincidence that. I found I just hadn’t thought my characters through well enough and I boxed myself into a frankly boring corner so the only thing to do - 56 -
