What it is, Flash Friday in Flash Friday

I guess someone should explain what flash Friday is, if I don’t the burden falls elsewhere. That seems somehow wrong or at the very least chickenshit.

What it is; it’s a writing exercise the way tai chi is a dance or fishing is a sport. Tai chi, fishing and flash fiction are forms of meditation, exploration, the adventure of serenity, or, you know, a work out, a trout and a smallish composite suggestion of a story.

That’s my lead in because it’s all fluid, the rules, which, as I remember them, are to follow shortly, but it’s really important to me that people who want to participate understand the rules have more to do with playing nicely with others than they are the borders of the sandbox. Rules;

1. Leave prompts and take prompts. The prompts can be anything, a word, a phrase, an event. I always do them in threes but that’s sort of my sense of asymmetry there are no hard and fast rules on how to leave a prompt, but without them it’s not very participatory.
   
2. The flash can’t take more than forty five minutes to write. This really was never an issue; typically no one took more than a half an hour. The important piece of this rule is to not overthink, not be self-conscious; it’s the fiction equivalent of that shrink game of word association except no one will leave you a diagnosis.
   
3. Ok, this isn’t a rule but the word diagnosis in #2 made think about something --- the idea is to prompt people to create, and quickly and concisely and to find that sweet spot they didn’t know they had. You wouldn’t tell a kid he caught an ugly trout because he cast badly or a tai chi novice that they weren’t graceful enough to achieve a sense of body-self. I guess what I mean is no trolling, just doing it is praiseworthy, it’s not a question of good or bad.
   
4. Shit I forgot the other rules, but, you know, you should probably do prompts early enough for someone to have time. It’s not a workshop type of thing, no one is in charge, you know, do it if you want, don’t if you don’t. I must be forgetting something. Hmmm maybe if I get outside the numbers …

I personally miss the hell out of flash Fridays. I personally really need them. I’m a long way from home and lost and I don’t have an organized mind and I don’t remember my dreams and I have no discipline and I really really need to process, the abstraction and brevity of a flash is perfect, the discipline of a chosen day, the strangeness of this new little box, it could be a revelation, a secular epiphany, an opiate placebo.

This explanation, however, is not for me, it’s for you. It’s almost as enlightening to see someone else blossom, especially someone who would never do this, than it is to find yourself impressed with work of your hands from twenty minutes of directed free association. Ideally getting a hit of both gives Friday a new edge. Let me call this an open invitation and say;

And I’m spent.