Well, first of all, the people who write flash are very cool. Secondly, I like the role word count plays in defining flash, how each word functions like the tick of a clock or a bomb. I love the ways of making words count, either all of them with equal weight or with just one word carrying it all. I love how the title might become a first line or last line or the entire back story. As one of the lonely kids who spent almost every single waking moment reading, I fell in love with words more than people, I think, and prefer trying to get words to line up the way I imagine to trying to get characters to want things and put these actions in motion long enough to get a story out of it. I love flash's awareness of its own end, right from the first word. And I love that, unlike a novel whose words seem to be written so they can be forgotten and exist then as ghosts that haunt what comes afterward, flash fiction lacks that past and future for the reader. It only is. And finally, as someone who wanted to be a poet but loved the sentence, I do love its poetic qualities, and how it allows me to be a kind of poet who wields sentences instead of line breaks, and to wear a baseball cap instead of a beret.
For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net's suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.
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