Flash fiction is one of the most underutilised and underrated techniques in writing. Even if you don’t want to write and publish flash fiction, you might want to give it a try if you need to dig into the reasons behind a period of writer’s block.

Creativity and imagination require an open mind ready to receive new ideas and play with them. Many of our feelings and reactions to a situation can shut this valve off, often when we most need a creative response. The funny thing about writing is that it responds to challenge. Present your muse with a preconceived idea fully accepted as truth and it will nudge at you until you explore the idea further.

Sometimes the very reason we experience a block is due to an ingrained and conditioned aversion to digging too deeply into something we don’t understand. You may be writing fiction when suddenly a character confronts you with a behaviour you don’t want to write about. Perhaps it’s your own behaviour, but it may be that of a parent or other authority. Fiction is an ideal place to explore your feelings about behaviours that you were told were acceptable but are not, or vice versa. Usually you might not have the time or plot space to explore such concepts in your actual novel – so taking these small points outside into a separate piece of flash fiction can help both with catharsis and with further plot strands and/or new stories you might never have come across otherwise.

Don’t be afraid to let your characters explore subjects for you. Prejudice, insecurity, fear, misconception and misunderstanding, rules and religious laws, jealousy, resentment, disappointment, frustration, boredom, disillusionment – any of these can cause paralysing block if we let them control us. Why not let a character control the situation instead?

Flash fiction of no more than a page or so is great for getting straight to the point of your problem. Allow yourself to have the feeling of directing actors on a tiny, focused stage. You can try different responses, personalities, and histories for the characters and see if it changes the scene in any way. It also gives you empathy for all of the people involved, instead of just a single reaction or a list of feelings.

Another reason flash fiction works well is the same reason it is easily dismissed – it’s short and often considered unimportant. This preconceived idea tricks your internal editor into allowing you to write whatever drivel you want “because you’re only writing flash fiction”. With that pesky editor out of the way, too snobbish to stick its nose in such a piece of writing, you can actually produce a few gems that might be highly usable.

If the root of your block is your emotional reaction to something, fictionalising it can distance you from your problem while you study it - your resentment or other negative emotions that can cloud your view of the situation are removed. Many people find it difficult to assess themselves honestly – we tend to either put a better spin on our actions or make ourselves out to be worse than we really are.

Dig back and find the root of your blocking feeling. Write about it. Now write about why you (or your character) feel this way. Write about the other person’s point of view – remember to use dialogue and action as you would with any story, but keep your word count tight.

Whether you’re left with usable vignettes or not, hopefully the exercise will have renewed your freedom to write.

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If you need some help writing flash fiction try Creating Short Fiction : The Classic Guide to Writing Short Fiction by Damon Knight, or Writing Realistic Dialogue and Flash Fiction by Harvey Stanbrough.