Recently, a class at UVic has had me writing a lot of flash fiction stories. What I’ve discovered, is that I’m far more potent when writing postcard stories over a three to six thousand word story.

While the word count seems to vary from place to place, postcard stories generally fit on one or two pages. It makes for a hefty limitation. Trying to explore a character’s mindset without being explicit can take pages of work, and even a spare description could eat up one’s entire word limit. Such a limitation demands concision, density of language, and a plot that leaves a large space for the reader to ponder.
I think that my best writing comes in with that concision. I think that I begin to drag on when writing longer fiction. Usually I have an idea that can be expressed in a short vignette, but feel compelled to drag it out into something longer. The bulk of the story becomes filler and transition between what I consider to be the important impressions and images.

Maybe it’s a poetry thing, where density is vital. In my poetry, I’ve noticed a tendency towards writing (and reading) spare poems that focus on the images—a short breath, generally.

Moving into a third year fiction workshop, I’m a little intimidated to return a (comparatively) longer story. To be blunt, I suck at making anything beyond a vignette interesting to both myself and the reader. I think I’m also in a better place now that I was a few weeks ago—at least I know my strength in prose, and that’s somewhere to work from.

If you have the opposite problem that I do, and suffer when attempting concision, I recommend trying to write a postcard story. Set yourself a firm limit, write a story of appropriate length, then start paring down. It’s pretty satisfying to root out your passive verbs, redundancies, and pare down your syntax into a much more spare line.

A couple contests and magazines look for postcard stories are:
Geist’s Annual Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest
The Museum of Words Flash Fiction Contest (Now closed)
The Blue Fifth Review (Stories up to 1,000 words)
Litro
1000 Words