I’m currently taking part in a multi-week flash fiction challenge/contest. For those who don’t know what flash fiction is, it’s basically a super-short story length. For the contest I’m in, the length is limited to 750 words or less. Most short stories are generally a few thousand words, so the word length constraint is significant.
I’ve so far written three stories, and a few things are becoming clear. One is that I’m not very comfortable at writing this length. While I can certainly write at shorter length, and I think I can create compelling stories while doing so, they aren’t the kind of stories that I enjoy writing. I like to really dig into the emotional undercurrents that live within science fiction and fantasy, and that is nearly impossible to do at this length. In a lot of ways I enjoy the tapestry of life and how all the threads illustrate a scene, a story, a situation, and that kind of rich view requires more than 750 words, that’s for sure.
I do want to note that you can certainly achieve a high level of emotion in a flash piece, but it is generally intense and highly situational. The emotion runs strong but is not very nuanced. As a writer, I miss the nuance. I like the nuance. I need the nuance.
So flash isn’t a length that feels natural to me. Still, it can be fun to write, and I definitely see myself occasionally dabbling in it. Just not very often. 
