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I don’t remember when I wrote my first piece of flash fiction. I tried to write poems and short stories in high school with different degrees of success. I graduated from Fifth Avenue High School in Pittsburgh in 1964. I’ve been writing ever since; but during the long and tortured road to successful flash fiction publication I didn’t plan to be a flash fiction writer. I’d never heard of flash fiction.

I knew for me, trying to write a novel was out of the question. I tried to write a novel two or three times but lost interest before the novels got very far. That left short stories. After years of sending out short stories and getting them rejected I was devastated with the final realization that no one was going to publish a short story of mine.

Still, the dream of publication would not die. Then as a fifty-something-year-old undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh I discovered Raymond Carver. Raymond Carver was not a flash fiction writer; but the concept of “minimalism” that was attached to his early work caused me to have an epiphany: If I could tell a story, a complete story, a well written complete story in 1,000 words or less using the minimal amount of concrete sense details that projected an impact on the life of a character beyond the length of the story my stories would probably be very attractive to publishers and editors who are always pressed for space in their publications even if they are online publications. It was a powerful epiphany but I was ready for it. I understood it in my bones.

This epiphany has worked for me as a writer. If you are a writer, maybe it can work for you.