To help orient or “ground” the reader, it’s important to establish the “ground situation” quickly, especially in flash. This is done by providing “grounding” or providing “context” details of where and when the story is occurring. Identify where and how “grounding” details are established in Sterchi’s piece. Now your turn: see how much “grounding” information you can embed in your first sentence. Consider the journalistic Ws: who, what, when, where, why.

Christmas in July? Why not Christmas in April! In “Powder,” Tobias Wolff uses the holiday to create tension between family members and displays how a story’s setting, both time and place, can put pressure on the plot. Notice how Wolff creates a number of internal and external “stakes” in the piece. 

Opening lines are supremely important in all works of fiction, but especially in flash since there is no room to overcome a weak beginning. In flash, sometimes the opening line is nearly the entire story—the rest is just expansion of the opening line or theme and variation of it. What do you think makes a good opening line in general? Why is this specific opening line of “The Wig” an effective one?

Let’s keep rocking that repetition! Gregory Burnham’s “Subtotals” progresses by rigidly adhering to and repeating an established form/structure, in this case the phrase, “Number of…” Try writing your own story using this template. Number of times fallen in love? Number of imaginary friends? Number of Ben & Jerry’s consumed?

We all know what it’s like to face that tyrannical blinking cursor on an empty screen.When you’re stumped about what to write, remember the five “modes” of fiction writing you can use: dialogue, description, exposition, physical action/staging, and interiority/commentary. In “Umbrella,” pay attention to each sentence. What “mode” does each use? Look at the line, “Had her inadvertent action shown the boy that she felt that she, too, belonged to him?” Which of the five “modes” of fiction is employed here? What specific style of narration is used?

Short story master Anton Chekhov famously described his process for writing stories by grabbing the nearest object, which happened to be an ashtray: “If you wish…by tomorrow I will write a short story. Its title will be An Ashtray.” His friend Korolenko commented “It seemed that the ashtray had already created images, ideas, and a chain of adventures in his mind.”

What duller object can you get than a dish? But Michael Martone proves that a good writer can imbue any item with metaphorical significance. What do the dishes represent for the girl? What do the dishes represent for the narrator? Now try it yourself: See how an object in your story might on greater significance by meaning different things to different people.

A gun? A bank robbery? A baseball game? A masterful handling of narrative time? That’s right, folks, you can find all of these and more in Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain.” Our protagonist, Anders, is a bit of a grump, but watch how Wolff develops his character. Check out the paragraph that starts “It is worth noting what Anders did not remember…” How does this section offer a “counterpoint” to Anders’s prior characterization in the story? How is his character “deepened” or made “complex”?

Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” is a classic example of how repetition can achieve an effect. In this second-person instructional, a mother gives her daughter varying pieces of advice. Notice the effect of mixing advice with various degrees of severity in the list: “Wash the white clothes on Monday” vs. “this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child.”

One way to structure a story with fantastical or surreal elements is to set up premise, develop a pattern of ramifications, then escalate that pattern. Check out how Russell Edson creates a pattern of absurdity, then escalates it in “Dinner Time.”