Toby Litt’s top ten
flash fiction tips

Cut and change

The advice I most often give on writing any kind of story is – cut the first sentence, cut the last sentence and change the title (so that it’s less obviously connected to the story).

Don’t forget the flourish

Conversely, don’t cut for cutting’s sake. It’s better to remove whole sections or paragraphs than attack sentences until they’re tonally flat, and sound like they’ve been written by ChatGPT or someone who takes no pleasure in the flow of language. Flash fiction still leaves room for excess, for a flourish.

‘A sense of corners’

V.S. Pritchett said that the short story was ‘something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing’. But this is a much better description of flash fiction. A short story can be far more expansive, in time and in form, than Pritchett allows. It’s often the initial idea that’s the glimpse; a story, though, can be a gaze. But flash fiction needs to have a sense of corners, of passing.

In and out

To write a novel you need to have one good idea; to write flash fiction you need two – one to get you into the story, and the other to get you out. A novel can meander very happily and end entirely inconclusively. A flash story doesn’t have this luxury – although there’s no reason the writing of it can’t be very slow.

Be irresponsible

Flash fiction can be throughly, delightfully irresponsible. You don’t have to live with these ideas of yours for months or years, and neither does the reader. Make a virtue of this opportunity for oddity and explosiveness.

Backstory and foreboding

In a story of only 250 words, there’s hardly any space for subplot. But there’s no reason it can’t contain backstory or foreboding in every single one of those words.

Keep moving

As David Byrne sang, ‘Say something once, why say it again?’ If one of your sentences lets us know that your main character is full of joy, the next sentence should be telling us something else. Keep moving.

Gaps matter

Think about the gaps you can create between sentences. Readers of very short fiction are expert at jumping or filling these gaps – that’s why they’re such good readers. Stretch them to their limits.

Stay open

Try to keep the possibilities open for what Grace Paley’s short story collection calls ‘Enormous Changes at the Last Minute’. Perhaps that switchback you make just before you submit the story is what it was waiting for all along.

Entertain yourself!

Most of all, entertain yourself. The initial version of the story you tell doesn’t have any greater moral authority than the fourth or fifth. You don’t need to obey and worship it, just because that’s how it first appeared to you. Try telling the whole thing backwards – perhaps it’ll be better that way.

Find out more about Toby Litt, our flash fiction judge here.

Deadline for flash fiction submissions 31 May 2025. Enter here.