Flash Fiction Advisory

Flash Fic Advisory: Worldbuilding

Worldbuilding in a short-short “weird” fiction is like making a ship in a bottle: the space is limited and imprecise tools must perform like precision instruments. Words matter. Contrary to a lot of advice on flash fiction, avoid words with double meanings. A word with a double meaning can carry more water for the author in limited space, but the risk of confusion is too great. When building a world in less than a hundred words, tangible meaning gives the story direction. An author plays too clever for the medium by conveying a vampire herbologist who casually “drinks her mate.”

Flash Fic Advisory #2: Use Single-Meaning Words.

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xdpaul's recurring, supershort weekly column focuses on insight into the practice of Flash Fiction. An unpublished novelist by pseudotrade, he mostly does flash as a writing exercise, but has had flashes published at Ideomancer, Don Muchow's Would That It Were? and Diagram's first anthology.