Micro Flash Friday

It’s Friday, Fans, and time for you to “flash” your humor, creativity and overall brilliance.

What you’ll see here on Fridays is some kind of prompt for a micro flash from you. What’s a micro flash, you ask? A new term for microfiche, which is totally outdated technology?

Nope. It’s a scene, or a literary snapshot about something. Whatever that idea is that’s knocking around in your head, it’s not enough to be a story, but it’s enough to get someone thinking, or even laughing. The end is unexpected, like the punch line of a joke, but it’s not exactly a joke, either. It can be a moral, a value, a family bombshell, or something completely different.

So today’s idea to get your juices going is itself a micro flash. The myth is that Ernest Hemingway wrote it in response to a bet. The way I heard it way back in a college literature class is that he took the bet and wrote it on a paper napkin. Who keeps napkins? Hey! That can be a flash idea. Anyway, I don’t actually know for sure about the Hemingway theory and never bothered to track it down. But I always remembered the six words because they’re kind of creepy.

Even if you don’t want to write a piece of micro flash, or anything else for that matter, leave a comment about what you think of this alleged Hemingway story.

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