How to Produce a Modern Flash Fiction
Write, because something beautiful always breathes when you do. You already know the world is changing and being a writer is difficult. Breathe deeply. That’s one of the only things you’ll have to do on your own.
None of your friends have any idea what writing is like, so both your privacy and writing won’t be taken seriously. But if you’re starting to produce flash fiction, you’ll have to get used to that.
Get rid of any distractions. Clear anything unnecessary off your computer, including the articles on creativity and concentration. Stop pretending that watching TV inspires you to write. If you don’t have a story idea right now, you won’t have one after another five-hour binge. You might as well close the book from your ‘to-be-read’ pile that you opened a week ago. Now, for your idea.
First, figure out the genre of your story. If you plan to make a short story collection, publishers will care. If you plan on submitting to magazines, most of them won’t care. If you plan on only writing for yourself, you’re going to starve. Science fiction or surrealism may work but don’t go for horror. You can’t scare someone with a thousand words.
Your past is a good place to start. Maybe an exploitable traumatic memory you can milk for one thousand to fifteen hundred words. Isn’t that why you became a writer to begin with? If you’re going to use something from your past, make sure it’s a brief moment with a small character list. Like looking through a window. You should have taken a poetry class at some point.
You could write a story in space representing your relationship ending. Or a story about a jungle expedition representing your relationship ending. Or a surrealist story representing how all relationships end. Alternatively, you could write a story about something other than a relationship. Contemplate how more life experiences would have affected your writing. Tell yourself how much talent you have and how many great, smooth words you have in your mind, even though the only things running through your mind are images.
The beginning must be beautiful and let the reader know how they should read the rest of the story. If you’re going for sarcasm, it better be clear within the first few words. If it’s horror, the first sentence better be scary. But don’t make it horror. And don’t narrate everything to the reader. These stories require immediacy, or whatever. The good news is you just need the opening. Whatever nebulous image you’ve cooked in your mind, sum it up in two sentences. Now, delete the second sentence so you just retain the premise, and you have your opening.
Then, feed your opening to the AI of your choice.
Simply input your opening and ask it to finish it for you. Of course, you can input a longer section, but you were taught to be concise. There are many creative engines to choose from but ‘Writer’s Block’ is among the better. It listens longer than it writes, but some people get uncomfortable with that. ‘Finish Me’ is also good but too many people use that for erotica and it tends to get confused with anything else. ‘Hemorrhage’ is newer. It keeps generating until you stop it or until the words spread beyond what you can manage.
Stay away from dialogue unless it’s necessary for the story. These AIs aren’t specifically designed for flash fiction (yet) so they’ll throw in some dialogue and exposition. Both are bad. Clip any dialogue and start at the last full sentence to generate again. The AI will spit out several paragraphs with surprising depth. They’ve come a long way from the beta. Read what the AI produces and laugh to yourself as you contemplate how much better it is than anything you’ve written.
Adjust until you’ve reached around a thousand words. The character interactions will veer into erotica so guide them back to your original idea. Then read your story out loud. It won’t make any sense near the end since the AI doesn’t (yet) compute how to produce a narrative arc. Never mind the characters, you don’t even remember what you named them. Some placeholder names like ‘Johnathan’ or ‘Arnulfo.’ Come up with the last few lines yourself.
Look around the room for any inspiration. No, not on your phone. Not the TV. It has to come from you. Squeeze your head. Grasp at the words you need. The perfect combination of words to end the story.
Squeeze.
Darkness…
Squeeze.
Sunset…
You’ll squeeze harder, but no more words come out.
Only blood.
Christian Barragan is a graduate from CSU Northridge. Raised in Riverside, CA, he aims to become a novelist or editor. He is currently an MFA candidate at Hollins University. His work has appeared in The Raven Review, Across the Margin, and Caustic Frolic, among others.