 Hello, my name is Dr. Smerian, and today we're going to go over a few tips for how to write good flash fiction. One thing you're going to learn from any writing class is that short stories and novels are completely different beasts. That doesn't get me wrong, there's a lot of crossover between advice on all writing, but there are things you can do in a short story that you can't do in a novel, and vice versa. Short stories will necessarily have a quickened pace in comparison while a novel can take longer to develop characters. What most people can't tell you, because it's only now emerging as a major format, is that flash fiction has its own quirks that make it significantly different from those two forms of writing. Creepypasta, SCPs, and Tales are just a few of the ways this format can be written. Today we're going to go over the introduction of a tale I wrote yesterday, and see what kind of lessons we can take from it. To be fair, a tale could be any of the three formats, but there aren't any tales I know of that are novel length. There are, however, a number of them that are short story length, and some tale series are essentially just short stories that are broken up into small chunks. The tale I wrote, though, is definitively flash fiction. Now one thing about flash fiction is that it's very short, often under a thousand words. Video killed the radio star, it is a tale of less than 700 words. I was feeling a bit melancholy and nostalgic about my earliest days on the site after a favorite SCP of mine was deleted from the wiki, and my coping mechanism was to write a story, and that story had a purpose of making other people feel the same nostalgia I was feeling. The piece is essentially just one character talking to a group about what happened to the SCP in question. The thing about flash fiction is that you need to establish your setting, your characters, and your relationships as quickly as possible, but also subtly. If it's a one scene story, you're going to set that scene fast, and we don't need to know the color of the walls. There are really a couple of ways to do this, and probably more that I haven't thought of. At first, use a sensory description to immediately bring the reader into your world. Think of the phrase, the sound of a shovel as it strikes damp earth at midnight. Now aside from being slightly purple, reading that, you would know generally what your setting is going to be, because you know the sound of a shovel scraping dirt. You've heard it before on television, you've heard it in a movie, you've heard it in real life, so you can put yourself into that sensory space. Also, there's a bit of an olfactory element, because you know what wet dirt smells like. And of course, the fact that it's midnight gives you the thoughts of isolation in moonlight. You can reinforce this thought by continuing down that line for the rest of your story, and my tale uses a completely different method. I describe the setting very briefly, but then I use that description to describe a set of events in motion. This is related to pacing your story properly, and flash fiction has an incredibly fast pace. When things aren't moving, people tend to tune out. If you're going to take the time to describe your setting in a little detail, make sure that some action is happening as well. In my tale, I'm describing a crowd of scientists in folding chairs being shown a series of images on a screen. That's pretty boring, so I start the tale with all of them raising their eyebrows, giving the audience a hint of what's to come and a sense of curiosity towards what exactly is going on. And then I introduce my two main characters, Dr. Yan and Dr. Thompson. These two characters are established with two separate defining traits, which gives a sense of their personalities and their stature. Dr. Thompson is explaining things to the group, and his defining trait is that as he begins, he pushes the glasses back up his nose. This is a basic physical tick that will be almost universally understood by your readers, and will easily help your reader visualize what the character might look like. Something like this requires a reader to fill in some of the blanks themselves without realizing it so the story can keep moving quickly. And Dr. Yan's defining trait for this piece is that he has his feet propped up on a desk separate from the rest of the scientists. This gives him not only a defining trait, but also a small hint towards a position of authority. During their first exchange, Dr. Thompson says, yes, sir, to Dr. Yan. And that settles the positions of authority. This finalizes the relationship of all of the characters to each other. Dr. Thompson is teaching the group, Dr. Yan is an authority figure. And that's as much context as is needed for the piece. And that's a setup for what follows. So that's it. You've got your setting, you've got your characters, and you've got your relationships. If you'd like to read the piece in question, there'll be a link in the description down below. As always, please hit the subscribe button to see more. And follow me on Twitter at D. Samarian. Thanks for watching.