A new way of writing

She climbed the ladder to find her book so she could read — only to realize her future was just a whisker away.

→This is my attempt at writing flash fiction.

In the last few weeks of school, I have been learning about a type of fictional stories called flash fiction. This new topic made writing in Medium a big struggle for me because everything I would think of was only six words. After all, flash fiction is, according to Wikipedia, “A fictional work of extreme brevity that is usually defined by word count; starting with six word stories to a couple hundred.” Basically, my writing world has been all about flash fiction and the thing that had me hooked was a flash fiction piece by Ernest Hemingway.

It was this picture and this story that got me hooked. I thought to myself over and over again for days, “How could something so short be so meaningful?” After days of thinking and feeling confused, I decided that there is a new way of writing sitting on the table. In fact, it’s been sitting there for a long time but no one recognized its importance. The new way of writing is something short but meaningful.

The reason why short stories are better than long ones is because they can possess more meaning in less words. This can keep the reader from getting tired and bored. Most of my classmates at school do not like reading because of the extra detail, time, effort and no sense of mystery. What short stories does is it keeps the real story a mystery, which keeps the reader on edge. In other words, the story leaves blotches in the writing, which gets filled based on the perspective of the person. For example, if your a feminist, you would understand the story completely differently than a college professor. These qualities of a short story make flash fiction more unique than other types of writing.

Once I felt the beauty of flash fiction, I found that this new way of writing became something that I would explore new roads in writing with.