That’s Tight: A Brief Lesson on Flash Writing

By Chelsey Clammer

It was nineteen years ago, when I was just twenty-one years old, that I kissed my dead father’s cold, gray, practically ashy forehead goodbye in a hospital in Austin. (29 words)

Cool sound there, but there’s the fact of unnecessary words. How you can try to fit an entire story in one sentence, but when you’re writing a flash piece, that fluffed narrative sentence takes away from the power of your writing. With flash, you have to accomplish exactly what the genre is asking for: FLASH.

It was nineteen years ago when I kissed my dead father’s cold, gray, practically ashy forehead goodbye in a hospital in Austin. (22 words)

In his introduction to The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction, Dinty W. Moore has this to say: “The brief essay…needs to be hot from the first sentence, and the heat must remain the entire time…. The heat might come from language, from image, from voice or point of view, from revelation or suspense, but there must always be a burning urgency of some sort, translated through each sentence, starting with the first.”

So let’s consider that opening line. While important for any piece of writing, especially in flash, the opening line needs to do more than hook the reader. It needs to entice. Tease, even. Be full of so much punch and narrative within itself that it knocks the reader to her knees, and yet she’s begging, pleading for more narrative.

It was nineteen years ago when I kissed my dead father’s cold, gray forehead goodbye in a hospital. (18 words)

This is the work of flash. Especially when writing about trauma. Just touch on it—because it can be emotionally hard to write about a traumatic moment that has become an extended experience we live throughout our lives. Trauma becomes a part of our narrative, of who we are. But if you think about it, when we have that traumatic experience, it really is just a flash of a moment. In fact, part of the definition of trauma is that it is a shock. And shocks don’t happen over a long period. Rather, a shock is exactly that: a jolt. Something so quick, it changes us forever—like a good opening line. So it makes sense, then, that flash writing can be the perfect genre for writing about trauma.

Nineteen years ago, my lips pressed against my dead father’s forehead.(11 words)

Note: at this point, I’ve cut the word count of that proposed opening line down by more than half. You can do this for the entire flash piece in fact. When you have your final draft of 500, 750, or even 1,000 words—the standard word count for the flash genre—cut another 50, 75, or even 100 words. It’s a challenge, but it can distill your narrative to its essence. As you chop down your word count, you might lose some details of that original opening line. (In my case: the timeframe, the age, the ashy, the location.) But that’s okay because you must understand that maybe some of those details aren’t as important to the piece, at least not in that opening line. So think essence. Think image. Think words that burn.

Just a peck on Dad’s forehead—he was dead. (9 words)

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Chelsey will be teaching an online 6-week flash trauma narrative course through WOW! Women on Writing that begins January 1st.

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Chelsey Clammer is the award-winning author of the essay collections Human Heartbeat Detected (Red Hen Press, 2022; finalist for the Memoir Magazine Book Awards 2023), Circadian (Red Hen Press, 2017; winner, Red Hen Press Nonfiction Manuscript Award), and BodyHome (Hopewell Publications, 2015). Her work has appeared in Salon, The Rumpus, Brevity, and McSweeney’s, among many others. She was the Fall 2019 Jack Kerouac Writer-In-Residence through the Kerouac Project.