I was looking at some old blog post for some reason, I really don’t remember why, and I saw that we used to have flash fiction challenges on Friday. More than one of my co-authors in our scary anthology mentioned they started following the blog because of the flash fiction challenges.
Well, it’s something to think about.
After all, one of the best ways to help build your writerly muscles is to write short stories – and what is flash fiction except a really short story?
So we can think about that.
Also, on other people‘s blogs that do flash fiction challenges, they would let the winner be decided by the readers, and the winner would get a guest blog post. That might be worth looking into. Maybe I could have the winner receive a book from one of our many author friends.
The main thing is, you have the whole weekend or maybe more to come up with some kind of crazy story based on the prompts I give, and it would be a fun way to spend your weekend! Think about a story and then crank something out.
Dan Alatorre 
I love flash fiction challenges, although I’m not sure I’ll be able to take part every week.
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I’m not sure I would be able to do that every week! It doesn’t sound like it would be a lot of work to set up, but some of them were.
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I enjoyed them!
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They were fun, weren’t they? I should really consider doing it.
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A good way to take the imagination into unexpected directions.
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Right! We usually use some sort of random topic generator and a required prompt so you were forced to write about something you probably would never come up with on your own.
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In those circumstances ‘Random’ is good!
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Sounds like fun!
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Cool.
I guess the people who don’t like the idea aren’t saying anything.
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I used to do a great flash fiction challenge where the prompt was the title of a song. But it stopped, so I stopped. They eat a bit into WIP time. But they’re definitely fun.
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Yeah, that’s true. Writing time is precious and spending it on silly stuff is hard to justify. On the other hand, it builds writerly muscles and can jump start a stuck writer…
I wanted to talk to you about something anyway. Our theme for the March contest is mystery, and you’re kind of our resident expert on that. Maybe you could talk to me a little bit about the basic elements most mysteries have. Tropes, things readers of that genre like or insist on. Stuff like that.
Thoughts?
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Yes, the advantages of flash fiction are just as you say. And I’m sure it’s not silly – mine tend to be, but there are loads of people who specialise in it, with whole journals devoted to it.
Mystery is a great theme! Thoughts… I dare say I have some somewhere, I just have to get them together and pick a few to send to you.
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Please do. You are the first person I thought of when I got involved with this!
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