You read enough flash fiction and maybe four or five flash fiction techniques actually rewire how you sit down with a blank page. The rest you forget. These are the ones that stuck.
The Last Line Has to Carry Weight the Rest of the Piece Doesn't
Amy Hempel's In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried ends with an image of a chimp signing the word "baby" to her own reflection. The whole story, every deflection and hospital visit and weird trivia fact, funnels into that single gesture. You don't realize the weight of it until you've already read past it, and then it sits in your chest.
Hempel studied under Gordon Lish, and one of the flash fiction techniques she carried from that apprenticeship was treating the final line as load-bearing architecture. Everything above it can be playful, indirect, even confusing. But that last line has to hold the meaning of the whole piece on its own. She once compared writing to sculpture, starting with a lump and taking away. The ending is whatever's left when you can't remove anything else.
I think about this every time I draft something short. If I can swap my ending with any other sentence in the piece and nothing changes, I haven't found the real ending yet.
Sensory Detail Can Replace an Entire Backstory in Flash Fiction
Stuart Dybek's Pet Milk opens with evaporated milk swirling in coffee, the way it blooms and clouds before settling. From that one image, he builds an entire relationship, a whole era of a person's life in Chicago. The milk in the coffee becomes the past thinning out, memory dissolving into the present. He never tells you any of that. He just keeps describing what things look like and taste like and smell like, and your brain fills in the rest.
This is one of those flash fiction techniques that sounds obvious when you say it out loud but takes years to actually trust. A single sensory detail, chosen well, can do the work of three paragraphs of exposition. It's the difference between a cook who lists every ingredient and one who just lets you smell what's on the stove. Dybek's The Coast of Chicago is full of this. He writes about a city through its light and food and weather, and somehow that tells you everything about the people who live there.
The Best Flash Fiction Borrows Forms From Outside Literature
Jamaica Kincaid's Girl is built as a list of instructions. Wash the white clothes on Monday. Soak the color clothes. Don't walk bare-head in the hot sun. It's a mother speaking to a daughter in one long breathless sentence, and the form, that endless imperative catalog, is what makes it devastating. If you broke it into normal paragraphs with scene and dialogue, it would lose half its meaning.
The technique here is structural borrowing. Kincaid took the shape of a recipe or a set of household rules and filled it with an entire relationship, a colonial history, a portrait of womanhood in Antigua. The form carries information the words alone can't. You feel the relentlessness of the mother's voice because the sentence never stops, never pauses for breath, never lets the daughter respond.
Diane Williams does something similar in a different register. Her stories in Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine often read like fragments of overheard conversation or sentences arriving from somewhere you can't quite place. The form is the meaning. When I started thinking about flash fiction techniques this way, about what shape a piece could take before I even chose the words, everything opened up.