flash fiction – Page 3 – Andrew Careaga

Friday Five: grand openings

How powerful first lines can draw your reader into your story.

One lesson the professors at journalism school drilled into my head was the importance of crafting a compelling first paragraph (aka the lede in news parlance).

The opening paragraph is the most important element of your story. It must grab readers’ attention and get them to read more, so it must be finely crafted and honed to its sharpest possible point.

The same applies to more literary writing–whether a novel, a short story, or a creative nonfiction essay. These five opening sentences from some recent stories and essays do a good job of hooking the reader. Each example below comes from The Pushcart Prize XLIX: Best of the Small Presses 2025 Edition. And while there are other notable pieces I could have pulled from this anthology, I chose these five because they are great and because you can also read them online, for free.

Friday Five: ghastly, ghoulish gaffes that can haunt your writing

Don’t let these goblins creep into your writing.

Peak scary season is upon us, my goblins and ghouls, friends and fiends. Whether you’ll be doling out sugary treats to the little monsters that knock on your door this Halloween night, partake in an adult-oriented costume party, or binge on classics like Young Frankenstein or Rocky Horror Picture Show (I highly recommend either, or both if you’re in the mood for a science fiction double feature), know that after tonight, it all comes crashing down like a sugar high, and we all must end our revelries and return to our writing. (Although some of us may prolong that inevitability by celebrating well into el Dia de los Muertos. Why not make a weekend of it? They’ve already got Christmas decor in the aisles of Dollar General and Hobby Lobby.)

Even after all the hoopla subsides, we writers must come to terms with some scary goblins that can haunt our work year round. Here are five scary creatures that may hang around well after All Hallows Eve, like toilet paper on the stately elm in the front yard of Mr. Henderson, who always handed out those filling-yanking sticky, taffy-like things wrapped in waxy orange and black paper.

Friday Five: lessons from a lit mag first reader

What I’ve learned from the past six months of reading submissions for a literary magazine

For the past six months or so, I have volunteered as a first reader for a literary magazine. In this role, I’ve been one of the first people to read some 150 flash and micro-fiction submissions to this magazine. They come from writers of all kinds. There are the newcomers seeking their first acceptance, the veterans with several publications and awards to their credit, the MFA graduates and PhDs, the college professors, the undergraduates, the college dropouts, the writers of science fiction, horror, humor, crime, romance, fantasy and just about every other genre, including literary, and writers from every continent except Antarctica. I’ve read pieces submitted for contests as well as regular submissions to the magazine.

The experience of reading all of these submissions has taught me a lot about writing and the submission process, and I hope these five lessons will help you, too.

Feast your eyes on these recent publications

Nibble on these morsels published recently in The Argyle Literary Magazine’s “gastronomy” issue

Earlier this month, a couple of my pieces were published in The Argyle Literary Magazine‘s special “gastronomy” issue. As the title of this themed issue makes clear, the stories, poems, and creative nonfiction pieces of this issue all have something to do with cooking or eating food.

I hope you’ll take a few minutes to read my contributions, which are companion pieces of a sort:

“The Things Our Mother Made Us Eat,” and
“The Things My Father Used to Eat,” which was published previously in Club Plum Literary Magazine.

I hope you’ll also take the time to feast on some of the other delicious writings in this special issue and read more from The Argyle‘s previous issues.

Photo via Pexels.

A boring realist’s thoughts on keeping it real

Why verisimilitude matters in all forms of fiction (with examples)

Note: If you don’t want to wade through this entire post, feel free to go directly to the examples near the end of this post. – AC

I was reviewing some early chapters of a work in progress recently when I discovered a problem with the text that–while perhaps insignificant to the overarching plot–could ruin the story’s credibility and my credibility as a writer if I didn’t fix it.

The novel is set in the early 1980s, and music plays a significant role in it. In one early chapter, I reference a song that, when I was writing the chapter, I was certain was ubiquitous on FM radio during the time frame of this portion of the novel. But as often happens when I rely on my increasingly foggy memory, I did not remember correctly.