Friday, February 24, 2012

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 A new term for microfiche, which is totally outdated technology?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.

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

4 comments:

  1. Hi Holly,
    I Tweeted your post here. Good work.
    Ciao,
    Moi,
    Carole

    http://www.facebook.com/Writingdivine

    ReplyDelete
  2. To-do list that never gets done!


    (That's how I feel about my life right now--I added a dash to make 6-words! :)

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