Flashing - is it for me?

What do we think of flash fiction? I found a competition recently that required a story in a single sentence but that's too short for me.

The Scottish Arts Trust competition (https://www.storyawards.org/flashfiction) asks for 250 words. I looked through some short pieces and found one based on a photograph of some smokers in the early 1980s. (How do I know it's the early 80s? Smocks, shoulders, perms and moustaches). Using advice from the internet I began cutting and am currently down to 310 words. Do I continue to cut, hoping that 60 words, (approximately one fifth) are still unnecessary? Or do I start from scratch with a new story and save that one for something with a larger word count?

There are competitions that ask for 300 or 500 words. Crafting something with a beginning, a middle and an end that transforms a character through conflict in less words than a Survey Monkey text box is daunting. Advice on the internet suggests starting with the middle (to draw the reader in) and putting the ending in the middle (in case someone stops reading too soon? I'm not sure). Clearly, constructing a flash fiction is different to constructing a short story or a novel as there is no time to build and every word must count.

Another piece of advice was to write it and then cut it down. That is my life - texts, social media posts, emails, blogs all end up lose 20-30% of their word count. And another website recommended no more than two main characters.

There is a lot of advice out there but I suspect that I will just have to read some of last year's winners to see what works, and practice writing my own to find a style that suits me. Maybe we can share some on the forums.

PS. A different style of flash fiction competition, NYC Midnight, allows you up to 1,000 words. Generous, you might think, but you have to conceive and write it between midnight on Friday and midnight on Sunday (New York time). And it has to include a given item and occur at a given location in a given genre. And it costs $58. And it starts this Friday (10/7/20) http://www.nycmidnight.com/Competitions/FFC/Challenge.htm. It is very good fun, as long as you are able to dedicate the weekend to it, along with another weekend later in the year. And, if you are lucky/talented enough to pass the first two rounds, another 2 weekends even later in the year. You also receive good feedback from a panel of judges. And (did I mention?) it is really good fun!