Flash Your Fiction: Writing Exercises
These fiction writing exercises are designed to help fiction writers shave away the fluff and reveal the bare bones of a piece of fiction. We’ll start with one exercise that is best for helping writers assess the core structure of a story and then explore a few bonus flash fiction writing exercises that are good for developing concise writing skills.
What is Flash Fiction?
Flash fiction is a short story that is extremely brief. There is no official word limit, but generally, stories with less than 1000-2000 words would fall under the flash category.
Fiction Writing Exercises and Flash Fiction
Many writers have a habit of using gratuitous words and phrases in order to meet a word count, make a piece sound more rhythmic, or to enhance descriptive passages. Often, such words hinder a story because they leave less to the reader’s imagination. Other times, there is so much description that the plot and characters get lost in the fray.
Fiction writing exercises like the one below will help you pinpoint areas where excessive wording is creating a problem. In addition, it will peel away the layers of your story, revealing its core. Plus, it’s a very simple exercise and can be completed rather quickly if you’re using word processing software such as Microsoft Word.
Flash Your Fiction
Select a short story that you’ve written and is either completed or near completion. Try to choose one that is about ten pages long. Of course, you can do this exercise with an entire manuscript, or with a story that is just a couple of pages long, but ten pages is good to start with.
First, save the file with a new name so that you don’t lose your original work. Go through the piece removing every single adjective and adverb. Next, remove words, phrases, and sentences that do not move the action of the story forward, especially if they are solely there for description.
Finally, go through the story one last time removing as much as you can without making the piece unintelligible. A traditional example is:
Boy meets girl. Boy gets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy wins girl back.
Of course, this is an oversimplified example, but it certainly gives you an idea of just how much a story can be broken down into its basic movements.
More Flash Fiction Writing Exercises
If you don’t have any pieces that you feel are appropriate for this exercise, or if you want to try something a little different, or if you just want to do more flash fiction writing exercises, here are a few more projects you can tackle:
- Write a piece of flash fiction from scratch and try to keep it under 1000 words. If you really want to push yourself, aim for less than 500 words. It’s harder than it sounds!
- Instead of rewriting an entire piece, turn a scene or a chapter into a flash fiction story.
- Turn movies, novels, and other story sources into flash fiction writing exercises. Take the plot from a movie or book that you like and try to write it as a piece of flash fiction.
This exercise can be a lot of fun and it’s extremely eye-opening when you start to realize just how many unnecessary words we pack into our writing. It’s also interesting to see the raw skeleton of a story after stripping away its excess.
Are You Up For It?
If you decide to try any of these fiction writing exercises, feel free to post your story in the comments (as long as it’s not too long) or if you publish the story on your own blog, go ahead and post a link.
Have a great weekend and keep on writing!
If you have any fiction writing exercises to share, feel free to post them in the comments.
Melissa Donovan is a website designer and copywriter. She writes fiction and poetry and is the founder and editor of Writing Forward, a blog packed with creative writing tips and ideas.
Oh, this reminds me of the “book-a-minute” website where they have super condensed version of novels. Of course, those are meant for a laugh, but you can’t say there’s no truth in the way they summarized the stories.
http://www.rinkworks.com/bookaminute/classics.shtml
Kelvin Kaos last blog post..WordGirl: My New Favorite PBS Show
Thanks Kelvin, I’ll have to look for that site – it sounds interesting (kind of like Cliff’s Notes).
Hi Melissa! I used to write some flash fiction, but haven’t in a long time. If I write a story that has a plot (many pieces I write have no plot and use motivic constructs instead), I build it from the skeleton out. I’m not so much a fan of reading flash fiction, but I do write skeleton summaries and story maps (sort of the same thing but not artistic or to be read).
Some writers are anal about unnecessary words, but I tend to be the opposite and those unnecessary words become central to the prose, mood and expressiveness (in certain types of fiction). I trim something out of everything I write; sometimes it’s the plot itself. If I get the time, I’ll write some flash fiction
Bobby Revells last blog post..The Myth of Mental-Spiritual Limitation
Hi Bobby! I love flash fiction – especially as a reader. I guess there are no in-betweens for me because I like stories really long or really short. Writing flash is extremely challenging because you have to be very concise and that added challenge makes it fun. Now, I haven’t written a piece of flash in quite some time, so maybe I’ll feel differently next time I give it a whirl.
Most of my writing lately has been ultra-short. I’m trying to figure out how to capture a simple scene. As a result, I’m not certain how to flesh a story out. I guess this is a follow-up comment to your last post — blogging makes my writing shorter by default, since that’s how I’ve been writing lately!
I *love* going through writing and taking out unnecessary words. (I’m an editor.
Rebecca Reids last blog post..A Short-Lived Passion
Yep, there’s something about blogging that puts limits on one’s attention span. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not but if you want to write more concisely, then blogging will probably help with that!
Melissa,
I want to master Flash Fiction! I think it is the skill to grow for any blogger.
“Boy meets girl. Boy gets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy wins girl back.”
I am off to try it out!
Alik Levin | PracticeThis.coms last blog post..Kaizen Parents – GTD Kids
Flash is definitely a great way to sharpen one’s writing skills. That’s why I love this exercise (it’s one of my favorites). It’s truly a study that will reveal the raw material of your work and that can be quite eye-opening!
Blogging is concision.
Even if there’s enough ideas to go with a series, each of those posts have to be as tightly written as possible.
This isn’t the 1800′s, where novels were wordy on purpose. People wanted a big thick book for their money, and even more importantly; they were unused to building word pictures in their heads.
Novelists were supposed to be wordy; they needed all those words to help people get everything that was going on.
New medium: Film. Ever wonder why so many old movies had the little plane or train, and the dotted line from here to there? It was a story telling device. Film was new, and people couldn’t follow a simple jump cut.
Now, no dotted lines; you get the hero or heroine to Paris by jump cutting to them sitting in a cafe with the Eiffel Tower in the background. Modern audiences can follow that; 1930′s audiences could not.
Now we have people who have grown up reading stories in books, and they can follow “jump cuts” in fiction the way their grandparents could not. A story might not be served the best as flash fiction.
But the skills one gets by trying to compress; that’s important.
WereBears last blog post..Cats Who Love Packing Materials
Ah, the little dotted line. I’ve heard about this phenomenon before – how audiences needed a little help to understand the film medium in its early days. Now we can’t cut to the next scene fast enough! Everything has to be super short and concise and we’re constantly being told “Get to the point already!” I am not a fan of long, boring scenes, or lengthy passages of description, but I also don’t like things to move too fast. Somewhere in the middle feels about right to m.
Melissa,
I haven’t really spent time on fiction lately. I stumbled this post and will make time in the near future to try out your advice here.
Oh, and I love that photo!
*smiles*
Michele
Micheles last blog post..Don’t Let Your Past Keep You from Your Future
Thanks for the Stumble, Michele
Yes, that photo really caught my eye and I just had to use it for this one.
Hello Melissa,
I recently discovered your site and it’s great! All the articles and tips are very helpful. I’m very new to blogging and have been working on flash fiction. I recently posted one on my blog called “The Morning Run”. I would love to hear your comments.
Thanks Carmen. Blogging is a lot of work but it’s also very rewarding. Good luck with Carmen’s Chronicles. I look forward to visiting you there soon.
The Symbolism of Owls
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the owl.
Its ability to see at night is legend among the Native Americans, and this attribute is invoked during ceremonies when an oracle of secret knowledge is required.
Here I bring to your attention that any question the owlets asked and that began with ‘why’ I answered with confidence, even as those questions became more complex and touched upon history, philosophy, and foreign languages. I answered until the owlets no longer asked questions, perhaps because the questions revealed too much. Only then did I, the oracle unconsulted, stop answering.
West African and Aboriginal Australian cultures view the owl as a messenger of secrets, kin to sorcerers, as well as companions to seers, mystics and medicine people.
Maybe that is also why the owlets stopped asking questions—they might see their questions and the answers in print, for writers are sorcerers of words, seers of truths, purveyors of medicines—and some truths, like most medicines, are downright unpleasant.
During medieval times in western and central Europe it was fabled that owls were actually priestesses or witches in disguise.
Most obvious in my case, as I do my work at night, in the otherworldly electric blue glow of a computer screen. I lack substance in daylight and am prone to sunburn. To the owlets, who have now departed the nest, I am but a voice on a telephone—perhaps I am in disguise as a voice on a telephone.
Owls are associated with wisdom, foresight, and are seen as keepers of sacred knowledge.
Now that the owlets have acquired their own wisdom in more complex sectors of the world beyond the nest, the sacred knowledge is no longer required. Wisdom is a commodity to be manufactured by experience, not something to be received, like a phrase in passive voice.
You see, ladies and gentlemen, I am the owl. I have been perfectly comfortable with this—it gave some sense to my constant search for knowledge, my books, my writing. It justified the time during which I had been answerer of questions.
So it was with a great deal of consternation that I watched my kindred, the Patagonian Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus) fighting with a species of long-legged guinea pig called a Mara, in order to gain control of burrows in the Patagonian plain to shelter from the roaring Patagonian wind. I am told that the Patagonian Owl is also called—most prosaically—the ‘Burrowing Owl.’
Owls in holes, I need to think about that.