Flash fiction examples help to stimulate your writing process.
As you read through flash fiction examples, impress upon yourself how intricately the words are weaved to make for the most substantial amount of thought in the shortest amount of space. Click for Free Writer's Block Help E-Zine and Free E-Book Flash fiction stories, or other types of short short stories, can be of extreme assistance when learning how to write flash fiction of your very own. I took a class once while going for my Master's degree that dealt with all different forms of creative writing. Every single day, we were given a prompt to encourage our imaginations and see where our creative minds led us. It was a four-week course called the Writing Project. It goes on every summer at various campuses throughout the country. The theme for my summer program was race (in terms of the color of skin, not how fast someone can run). This flash fiction story is based off of the prompt that I was given in that class one day during that summer session. The prompt is the last paragraph of the flash fiction example, as we were told that we did not have to begin with what the prompt said, but could incorporate it in any way we wished throughout the story we chose to write. Read on for one of many flash fiction examples that exist. Ernest Hemingway has written many short stories which could be easily classified as flash fiction. Aesop has also mastered the structure of flash fiction writing through his fables. Find examples and garner techniques. Soon you will know how to write flash fiction all your own. The Times They Aren't a Changin'
"Experience has taught me that my job is rough." My great-great-grandfather wrote this down on a piece of parchment more than one hundred years ago. He was obviously ahead of his time. Worried about the future, inching away from the present. He was a disgruntled worker in a profession that fret over the color of a man's skin. What did he care that the man was black? For all great-great-grandpa cared, he could have been yellow, green, orange, aqua-marine, or maroon. He was a man, and the only thing great-great-grandpa was glad about was that the man hanging there wasn't him. He didn't have anything to worry about. He was a white man in the prime of his life doing the job of hanging the supposed guilty. How did he end up with a job like that, you wonder. Well, he was probably sitting around on his porch one day, soaking in the beams of sunlight, I suppose, when a man approached him and asked if he wanted a job. Well, my great-great-grandpa, a man with a wife and three kids, one of whom was my great-grandpa, he knew he had to take the job. The coal mine he worked in for the past few months had caved in a few days previous, and no money was coming into the house. The kids were hungry and great-great-grandma had caught a coughing spell, and was unable to see a doctor on account of their lack of money. Great-great-grandpa shook the man's hand and said he'd take whatever job he had to give. It was only after he got down to the courthouse that he realized what was happening. A line of black folks was filed out of the building, and trials were ensuing. Times were shouted out -- the times of the hangings, that is. Great-great-grandpa knew right away that he was not the right man for this job, but he was in desperate need of the money, and didn't know any other way to go about making it.
One day when a young man by the name of Wilkins was to be hanged, great-great-grandpa had a hard time getting out of bed, or so the story is told through the generations. He just laid there, depressed. He had already hanged five young men in the two days he had held this job. He came home every night sick to his stomach, disheveled, and exhausted. He was in no greater a state than great-great-grandma, whose coughing spell had turned into pneumonia. The children were left to tend for themselves during this time, and great-grandpa, being the oldest at twelve years of age, was able to keep his brother and sister calm and fed, somehow. Anyway, the story that great-grandpa told to grandpa, and that grandpa told to my dad, and dad told to me, goes that great-great-grandpa got up, chanced a glance in the sliver of a mirror in his bedroom, and without changing his clothes or eating a bite, left the house to be down at the courthouse by 7 am. They planned to hang Wilkins bright and early. As great-great-grandpa fit the noose around the Wilkins boy's neck, he muttered some words under his breath that he wrote down on that same piece of parchment later, because he was aware of the impact of the words, but doubtful that they would ever change anything, or allow him to leave his job. His job was rough, and he impresses that upon me when he writes this:"Figurin' out which way to hold the noose is the worse part of it. When this donkey moves, it'll just be another dead body to figger out what to do wit. What could this young'n have done to deserve a hangin'? But I jus' do my job and don' ask no questions, because this is the way times are, and they ain't bound to change no time soon."
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