Fiction in a Flash

“Brevity is the soul of wit,” and nowhere can you see that better than in Frisco Public Library’s Flash Fiction Writing Contest, where participants have to tell an engaging story with a developed plot and characters in 500 words or less! To put that into perspective, this blog post is 314 words.

Telling a story in 500 words or less is no easy feat and this year’s winning stories are a treat to read. Be prepared to laugh, cry, and contemplate your very existence. Please join me in a congratulating our winning authors: Meghan Logan for The Wind Sang, Cristopher Brown for The Cookie, and Cody Collier for The Perimeter. Listen to their stories below and checkout the eBook online to read this year’s and previous year’s winning stories.

Have a tissue nearby as you watch Meghan Logan read The Wind Sang.

Be prepared to laugh out loud at Cristopher Brown’s rendition of The Cookie. It has a twist you’ll never see coming.

Get exported to a future time that is as familiar as it is foreign, with Cody Collier’s science fiction tale, The Perimeter.

Are you inspired to try writing your own Flash Fiction? Try one of these writing prompts and get started:

• Write about a conversation you overheard.
• Suddenly your house cat becomes the size of an elephant.
• Write an end-of-days story from a non-human perspective.
• After years of training as “the chosen one,” you wake up on a plane with 10 other “chosen ones.”
• Open up your favorite book to a random page and pick a word. Use that word as the basis of a story.
• What if your shadow was alive?
• Describe a road trip.
• You stumble across an abandoned theme park.
• What if your phobias are based on how you died in a past life?
• Use an urban legend, myth, or folk tale as the basis for a story.