In flash fiction, the whole is a part and the part is a whole. The form forces the writer to question each word, to reckon with Flaubert's mot juste, and move a story by hints and implications. Flash stories are built through gaps as much as the connective tissue of words, so what's left out of a story is often more important than what's included. A single sentence can serve the function that a paragraph or even a chapter might in a longer work.
In this workshop, Grant Faulkner, co-founder of 100 Word Story and San Francisco's Flash Fiction Collective, will discuss how a different type of creativity emerges within a hard compositional limit. Come prepared to write short pieces and explore the expansiveness of succinctness.
Grant Faulkner is the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. He's published a collection of 100-word stories, Fissures, and been anthologized in Norton's New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction and The Best Small Fictions. He's also published Nothing Short of 100: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story, and his short story collection, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2021.
Grant has published one book on writing, Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo, and his essays on writing have been published in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, LitHub, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer. He serves on the National Writing Project's Writer's Council, Lit Camp's Advisory Council, and Aspen Words' Creative Council. He's also the co-host of the podcast Write-minded.