The Art of Brevity
A writing workshop with Grant Faulkner
10:30pm-1:30pm (Pacific Time)
Sat Aug 30th, 2025
This course will meet online via Zoom
In this virtual writing workshop, author and editor Grant Faulkner will conduct a workshop for writers of short fiction, creative nonfiction, and memoir.
The Art of Brevity
In flash fiction, the whole is a part and the part is a whole. The form forces the writer to question each word, to reckon with Flaubert’s mot juste, and move a story by hints and implications. Flash stories are built through gaps as much as the connective tissue of words, so what’s left out of a story is often more important than what’s included.
In this workshop, Grant Faulkner, co-founder of 100 Word Story and the author of The Art of Brevity—will discuss how a different type of creativity emerges within a hard compositional limit, exploring the many different forms that short shorts can take.
Grant Faulkner is the co-founder of 100 Word Story, the co-host the Write-minded podcast, and an executive producer on America’s Next Great Author.
He has published three books on writing: The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story; Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo; and Brave the Page, a teen writing guide.
He’s also published All the Comfort Sin Can Provide, a collection of short stories, Fissures, a collection of 100-word stories, and Nothing Short of 100: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story.
His “flash novel,” Something out there in the distance, a collaboration with the photographer Gail Butensky, is coming out in September 2025 with the University of New Mexico Press.
His stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including Tin House, The Southwest Review, and The Gettysburg Review, and he has been anthologized in collections such as Norton’s Flash Fiction America; New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction; and in several editions of the annual Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction anthologies.
His essays on creativity have been published in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Lit Hub, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer. He serves on the National Writing Project Writers Council, the LitNet Steering Committee, Litquake’s board of directors, and the Aspen Institute’s Aspen Words’ Creative Council. He also publishes the weekly newsletter, Intimations: A Writer’s Discourse.