How to Improve Your Flash Fiction

Flash Fiction has enjoyed a boom in popularity as of late. Skeptics will point to the fact that our culture is suffering from an ever-diminishing attention span. In my opinion, however, the beauty of the super short story is nothing new.

Concise literature has been valued for centuries, if not millenia. Ancient Greek and Roman texts utilized Epigrams constantly, boiling down their messages to sometimes a lone sentence. Aesop’s Fables taught complex moral lessons in a single, short tale. So while the new generation does have an affinity for Twitter’s 140 characters and six second Vine videos, the recent love for brevity may be nothing new.

Consider for a moment “Grow Capsules,” the popular children’s toy. You’ve probably seen these expanding capsules advertised in toy aisles, claiming to “Grow 600%!” I’d like to suggest that a good Flash Fiction story is much like these Grow Capsules. At first glance, they…