Take one of your old essays and try to write a flash fiction using some exerpts from the essay in the story!
Your move, writer.
Here's a running start for that one.
You could treat the essay like an artifact your character finds rather than something you wrote — a letter tucked in a drawer, a school assignment your narrator stumbles on years later, and the excerpts become evidence in a small mystery about who they used to be. Or go warmer: a grandparent's old essay about home or work becomes the spine of a quiet story about inheritance, the sentences dropped in like heirlooms that mean more now than when they were written. Or twist it toward comedy — a character's overly earnest college essay about "finding themselves" gets read aloud at the worst possible moment, and the flash fiction is really about the gap between who we performed on paper and who we turned out to be.
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