Over at Flash Fiction Chronicles today I have a post that recalls my misspent youth with some fondness. You see, it turns out all that time I spent reading Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks and Warhammer’s White Dwarf Magazine, I was actually learning how to write flash fiction. Yup, it’s true, all those little snipets of flavor text and one-page stories were way ahead of their time and many were perfect examples of what would come to be known as flash fiction. Not only that but some of that ‘fluff,’ as it’s called, went beyond mere vignette status to give us characterization, setting, and a beginning, middle, and end — all in a handful of paragraphs. This was a style of fiction I never saw anywhere else until the advent of the internet.
Turns out, when it came time to write the stuff myself, both the ‘fluff’ of the RPG and wargames world and spec fic of my own devising, I was ready (which is probably another reason to be saying Thank You, D&D).
Click here to read ‘How I Learned to Write Flash Without Even Knowing It’ at FFC.
