Writers Workshop flash fiction
Mike Richwine
5.29.26. 500 words
Introduction:
I have become interested in flash fiction recently. Flash fiction is a form of storytelling that attempts to create a complete emotional experience in very few words. Sometimes it is a few hundred words. Sometimes it is only a sentence.
The reader is asked to do part of the work. Instead of explaining everything, the writer provides a glimpse, an image, or a moment, and the reader fills in the rest.
The example most often discussed is the line commonly attributed to Hemingway:
“Baby shoes for sale, never used.”
Whether Hemingway actually wrote it is almost beside the point. In six words, the reader immediately begins constructing a story. Loss. Hope. Grief. Possibility. The writer never explains any of it.
I have been drawn to endings that work that way. In my own writing, I often think of them as “cymbal crash” endings—a line that lands and then lets the reader sit with it.
While working on the cover description for my novel, I started wondering whether I could describe the book without describing the plot at all. Instead of summarizing events, I pulled out a series of short lines that felt like miniature pieces of flash fiction. My hope was that, taken together, they might create the emotional shape of the story while leaving room for the reader’s imagination.
My question for the class is simple:
Does this work?
Do these lines create curiosity?
Do they suggest a story larger than themselves?
Would you buy/read this book based on this description?
Or are they simply too cryptic without more traditional description?
The world had suddenly grown older.
The truth about danger is that it rarely arrives the way a man expects.
You don’t conquer danger. You simply learn to walk beside it.
She had run it. Quietly, without credit, without changing the letterhead.
The company wasn’t the trucks or the contracts or the bank’s opinion of the collateral. It was Ellis.
Power didn’t test you when you were weak. It tested you when it offered to make things easier.
Hard work can outrun a lot. But it can’t outrun interest.
Oil had not just changed prices. It had changed the rules.
Some roads only look straight from a distance.
The danger wasn’t speed. It was believing you could control it.
The company had once felt unstoppable. That was part of the problem.
The trucks kept moving long after the certainty was gone.
There came a point where keeping it alive became the whole job.
Some men build companies. Others build the people who survive them.
The trucks hauled freight. The family hauled memory.
The weather wasn’t the dangerous part.
The land hadn’t changed them. It had revealed them.
The land always gets the last word.
That’ll do.
Texas. 1963–1990. Book two the Rawlins family Saga.