Fast Fiction: Creating Fiction in Five Minutes
Roberta Allen
ISBN: 1884910270
Copyright 1997
Story Press
Reviewed by Jon Labrousse

One of the most frustrating things as a high school teacher is the 500 word novel that students typically write.  They typically try to take on too much, too much depth, to much breadth in a short story.  In two pages, they'll write a story that spans seven years.  And they refuse to revise it.

This book provides some pretty remarkable tools for developing writers.  I should add, that a familiarity with what is typically called "Flash Fiction" or "Sudden Fiction" is in order.  The book provides some examples, but there are a few good compilations out there that would help a lot.  Flash Fiction and Sudden Fiction were the first.  There have been several follow-ups published since then (all available on Amazon.com).

The driving question, is what's possible in 500-1000 words?  The stories themselves are an interesting study in this.  The way I figure it, if students are going to write a 500 word story, and that's the best I can hope for, let's get serious about what a good 500 word story looks like.  (It's harder than it sounds!)

Enter Roberta Allen.  Here's the chapter list, for starters:

Part 1: The Short Short Story
1. Introduction
2. The Variety of Short Short Stories
3. A Comparison with Longer Stories
4. Generating Material for Short Short Stories
5. Shaping and Polishing Short Short Stories
Part 2: The Exercises
6. Five-Minute Fictions
7. Seeing Stories
Part 3: Writing Longer Stories and Novels
8. Getting Started
9. Going Back and Going Forward
10. Refining Longer Fiction

In Part One, Allen explains what short short stories are, and gives many examples.  More importantly, perhaps, she explains a method for writing them.  And this is the ground-breaking part, for me as a teacher of reluctant writers.  Basically, Part Two is a ton of writing prompts.  The way the process works, is the Five-Minute Fictions are lists of six prompts.  You choose one list.  You write a story, trying to get the whole story told, in just five minutes.  Then you move on to the next prompt.  There's no editing, no reading, even, of what you've written until you've done all six prompts.

Then, and here's a pretty cool, pretty different approach to things, you read your six stories and rate them on a scale of 1-10 for energy.  How exciting, how interesting is the piece?  Energy is everything.  The reason for five minutes is she wants you to just dive in and do it.  The point is to try to generate as much energy as possible.  That's the piece you want to edit into a finished story.

I've used this a lot in class, and I'm always amazed at how well it works.  Students who can't (or won't) write for 10 minutes on a journal entry, can and do write for five minutes.  They moan when the alarm goes off.  And they do it six times in one class section.  (I usually tell stories, or jokes, or make announcements or something for a few minutes between prompts to give them a rest and reset their brains.)

The students are almost always surprised at what they produce.  And having read examples of short short stories before we do this, and discussed them, they have a pretty good chance, and a pretty good success rate at getting a develop-able story out of the exercise when we work on revision.

So much so, in fact, that I've tried this five minute writing approach for other things, as well.  Everything from poetry to personal essays.  Since the emphasis is on energy, not mechanics and good writing, it frees the students up quite a bit.

I always do the writing with the students, and we share our highest energy pieces (without judgment, just to share).

Unfortunately, the book is out of print.  The good news, though, is you can pick it up used on Amazon for about $10 with shipping.