First flash and a writing prompt

How I went short, and other stories.

I’m not exactly sure of the first story I ever wrote, although I think it may have been about a duck, or a crocodile, but I do know the story that hooked me on flash fiction, my first published flash story. It came out in a print journal called Parting Gifts, from a small press in North Carolina. They published poetry, prose poems, and flash fiction—and this was in the 90s, when ‘flash’ still made most people think ‘dance,’ not ‘fiction.’

How this story came to be: during college, and sporadically afterward, I was working on a novel that grew and grew. I kept finding interesting rabbit holes to disappear into: “Let’s do a flashback to the mother’s childhood. She went to a Catholic school … okay, how can I find out which Catholic schools were in Rhode Island in the 1950s?”

That novel grew sideways, but not necessarily forward.

Then I went to a write-in at a poet’s house on Cape Cod. She gave us writing prompts and set a timer, so we only had short bursts of time to tell our stories: 10 minutes, 15, 25. For one of the prompts, I went back to that stalled college novel. It suddenly occurred to me that I’d known the ending all along. So that was what I wrote: an ending.

I never finished my college novel, but that was okay. I felt like that story had been told. I kept writing flash fiction. I wrote longer stories, too, but flash felt like finding the place I’d always wanted to call home.

Writing Prompt:

Write a story in which you quote a line or two from a pop song, or even just a title, and have it resonate in some way with what’s going on in a character’s life.

Time: 25 minutes
Bonus words: booth, bubble, gravel, pick

Story originally published in Parting Gifts, Summer 1997
Photo by the author