When I shoot macro, indoors or out, I put the camera's flash into "forced" mode, and diffuse/dim it with little piece of a white plastic shopping bag taped on. If indoors, I get as much off-camera light onto the subject as I reasonably can (I don't have any special equipment such as a lightbox, etc.) Sometimes I then find that the flash wasn't needed and switch it off before reshooting.
To minimize distortion, if the subject is large enough I will use normal mode at maximum zoom, rather than macro mode, but for my camera this requires about ~ 3 ft (1 m) distance in order for the camera to be able to focus. Also, my camera is rather old and has a maximum resolution of 2 megapixels, so if the subject will occupy much less than the middle third of the frame, I'll switch to macro instead of zoom.