Well, readers, we’re knee deep in our Flash Fiction celebrations. Here at The Maker, we’ve been working hard to bring you some excellent short fiction, as well as, hopefully, inspire you to write your own. On that note, we thought we’d deliver some Flash Fiction nuggets of gold to get you started with your pieces, or: 17 Ways for 17 Days. Enough to see you through to the end of June. So have a read, choose your favourite, and write your masterpiece. We can’t wait to read it.

 

1. My mother had one piece of silly advice for me when she died: when you get into the house of love, open all the windows.

 

     2. This is a sad story.

 

(Or, the equally provocative… )

 

3. This is no sad story.

 

4. There she stood at the onset of everything; hope, joy, pain, despair. All she had to do was take the first step.

 

5. On the 13^th June, at 2.40pm, Jack got the call.

 

6. As the troops marched into the city in the dead of night, a little girl sat in the window of her upstairs room, counting the swearwords in her parents’ conversation. Three. Five. Eight.

 

7. “When did you first meet the deceased?” The officer asked.

 

8. Jane woke up to an empty world one Tuesday morning in June.

 

9. The people of [insert town/village name] barely noticed anything was wrong the night they came; not until all the streetlights went out, and the eternal ‘vacancies’ sign above the motel fell, without breeze or brute force, to crash onto the ground below.

 

10. Autumn leaves patterned the ground on her walk to the station.

 

11. The ice sculpture had shattered, halting the party guests and leaving them gawking at where it once stood, and I had the pieces in my hands.

 

12. “I’ll find you if it takes a century and all the money and work in the world,” my mother said, as she put me on the lifeboat and pushed it gently out to sea.

 

13. The snow fell quietly on the streets of New York, where no one walked but me.

 

14. He dropped the key into the ocean. “What’s done is done,” he said.

 

15. Kate had lots of plans for her 25^th Birthday, but none of them involved handcuffs, mascara tracked down her cheeks, or her heels lying on the linoleum floor of the A&E waiting room.

 

16. Against a vast and immutable ocean, all that could be seen was a single woman standing on a surfboard, rowing her way calmly, further into the blue.

 

17. The street signs displayed the choice in front of me: right or left. One road or the other. One future or the other.

 

Before you start– cheeky bonus tip: Take one of these that seems to belong to an obvious genre and try writing it in another. Number one as a Sci Fi piece? Or perhaps an Austenian romantic spin on number six?

The choice, friends, is yours.

Happy writing!

 

Email all Flash Fiction submissions (to be published in June) to themaker@causleytrust.org , along with a brief bio about yourself and your writing.