An increasingly popular form of fiction that you may have heard of is often called flash fiction, though sometimes it’s also referred to as a short-short story, postcard fiction, sudden fiction, or micro-fiction. As its name implies, this form of fiction is essentially an extremely short story.

While there is no hard and fast rule for how many words a story should contain to be considered flash fiction, it is generally thought to be between 750 and 1,500 words. Considering most regular short stories run an average of 3,000 to 5,000 words, you can see that when I say flash fiction is extremely short, I mean it!

With that brevity comes a lot of challenges but also a lot of opportunities to craft something unique and exciting. Here are a few tips to keep in mind if you decide you’d like to try your hand at this deceptively tricky art form.

Narrow the focus
Flash fiction asks you to do something you may have never done before as a writer: Go small. Very small. This means that when you are considering what to write about, you must choose a very specific scenario on which you focus the entire piece.

If you’re used to writing longer fiction, this may feel really odd to you: What do you mean I can’t trace the historical and emotional arc of life for a young woman in the nineteenth century?! But with such a limited amount of words, you have to choose a small-scale event in which the emotional arc of your story can be contained. Instead of showing someone’s growth or change or downfall throughout an entire year or decade or lifetime, choose a specific scene that will symbolize that change—or at least the potential for it.

Pick an impactful title
Never has a title been more important than when writing flash fiction. Why? It can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you in terms of plotline before you even begin the actual story. A cleverly chosen title not only intrigues the reader and makes them want to read your piece, but it can also reveal your story’s time period, for example—or its setting, or main conflict, or backstory, or . . . well, you get the idea.

Lay it all out there quickly
Just like your title has to do a lot of initial legwork for your story, so do your first few opening lines. This is the portion of the story where it’s more vital than ever to hook the reader and reveal a lot about the piece itself.

How do you go about doing that? Play around until you have an opening line that contains some sort of blend between establishing a character, a unique narrative voice, the setting, the basic plot—or ideally some combination of all of the above. The more the opening line sets everything up, the more words you’ll have to devote later on to the meat of the story.

Nail the last line
Just as your title does a lot of heavy lifting, so will your last line carry more narrative weight than a typical last line in, say, a full-length novel. But instead of setting up the premise as you might do with the title, you’ll want to craft an impactful last line that leaves readers thinking about your story long after it’s over.

Some people choose to close their flash fiction with a succinct twist or shock, but my favorite ones end it on a more subtle note—something that makes you wonder about the characters or their fate and leaves it up to some amount of interpretation. That’s a great way to get readers talking, debating, and thinking about your story—and wanting more!

Write long, then go short
Some of these points may seem a bit overwhelming, especially if you’ve never tried your hand at flash fiction before. But rest assured: You can do it! And the easiest way to make sure you hit all the highlights while still crafting the kind of story you envisioned? Start big, as in a typical short story length, and cut it down from there.

There’s a unique—and oddly satisfying, to me at least—method of creativity involved when paring down a larger story into a tiny gem of a flash fiction piece. Yes, it will likely require a few rewrites of particular sentences, especially the last line, but for the most part, try to take what you have already written and get down to the nitty-gritty core of it. Be absolutely ruthless. Strip your short story down to its bare parts and see what you have. You might be surprised!

Andrea Moran lives outside of Nashville with her husband and two kids. She’s a professional copywriter and editor who loves all things books. Find her on LinkedIn.