Flash Fiction

Definitions of flash fiction vary, but here are some common ones. It is a story of one thousand words, more or less. It is the whole story, not a fragment, told in language that may be concise and poetic but is still prose. It uses the traditional ingredients of dialogue, characters, plot, development, and a narrative voice. It implies more than it says, suggests a larger world, and makes the reader want to know more.

These definitions exclude some flash fiction being published today. The wide range of styles resists a brief description. We live in a moment of shifting taste, when literary standards give way to experiments, and fashion rules capriciously. A snippet by Lydia Davis may be haute couture, a starved runway model clad in adorable rags. Only an established writer or a hot new kid can get away with it.

To extend the clothing metaphor, flash lacks some elements of a well-dressed story, such as explanatory background, stage-setting, and lavish description. Some critics believe any short story should dispense with these. Instead, it should concentrate on a few characters, one dramatic scene, or one decisive moment. Subplots are forbidden, and description is minimal. Select the significant detail that evokes all the rest.

The selective method leads to synecdoche, where the part stands for the whole, and to symbolism, where an object stands for an idea. Weather makes an appearance, to set the mood and suggest a set of circumstances: drought for poverty, or cold for the absence of a loved one.

A character needs a trait. In daily life, we sort people by gender, age, color, height, job, and place of origin. We pick something a person wears, such as a hat, or something they do, such as a nervous habit. A business owner I knew, a middle-aged fat man known to be stingy, often thrusts his right hand in a pocket full of coins and thrashes noisily.

Is flash fiction new? The term dates from the late twentieth century. It implies the story is over in a flash, a quick flare without lasting heat. Other labels from the same period are “short short stories” and “sudden fiction.” The Hungarian writer István Örkény (1912-1979) published “one-minute stories” in newspapers, so called because they took that long to read. The Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata published “palm-of-the-hand stories” from 1920 to 1972. Some are less than a page long. An American online magazine that publishes flash fiction calls itself Smokelong Quarterly, because you can read a story in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette.

Did flash fiction arise in the computer age as a figment of the internet? Is it a response to a shrinking attention span? Everyone is busy, according to this cliché, with too many demands on their time to squander it reading fiction. We are greedy, impatient, and easily distracted, like children who want it now. Yet there is no evidence of a change in adult mental stamina in the past thirty years.

The idea of flash as modern does echo something new, the online magazine where it frequently appears. And many of the people who publish, read, and write for online magazines are young, willing to try new things, and eager to subvert the established order. Compared to paper and print, digital publishing offers cheap, unlimited space, so it ought to favor long, digressive forms. But young editors, who also write for their own or other online magazines, prefer the short form. And a tablet or phone screen displays a small amount of text. A friend told me he stopped reading regular stories, because they strained his monthly data allowance.

The vignette, episode, list, sketch, anecdote, and profile are related types of very short prose. The distinction is in the lack of change or forward motion. A vignette shows a character, a thing, or an action, like a sound bite or a snapshot. A sketch is a static description of a place, a moment, or a situation. An anecdote illustrates a point but does not point beyond, in the way that a parable or an allegory does. A profile is a portrait of a man or woman, alive but stationary.

Length and movement aside, what is the difference between a story, a tale, a sketch, a yarn, and an account? Edgar Allan Poe says that some of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales are really essays. Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book contains classic short stories. Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook is a collection of stories linked by the narrator’s hunting trip. The brief notes, scenes, and lists that make up The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon have emotional depth, understated humor, and sharp observation. The labels we attach to short prose vary over time and are far from precise. Like botanical specimens gathered on a hike, short stories can be difficult to classify.

Short prose is prehistoric. It can be traced to Aesop’s Fables, stories in the Hebrew Bible, and ancient myths. Homer’s Odyssey incorporates such stories, altered to fit the hero Odysseus. The One Thousand and One Nights, with the framing device of Scheherazade and the murderous Shahryar, is a collection of ancient tales from India, Persia, the Mideast, and Greece, all told in Arabic.

A more recent precedent is the feuilleton, a snippet of urban or provincial life. Charles Baudelaire wrote fifty “prose poems” that he collected in 1869 as Paris Spleen. From the same time and place, Parisian newspapers of the 1850s to 1870s, we have classic short tales by Paul Arène, Alphonse Daudet, and Gérard de Nerval. The distinction between fiction and nonfiction blurs, as the pieces range from sober report to delirious fantasy. They resemble notes from a writer’s journal, observations of daily life that slip into make-believe.

American mass-market magazines in the early twentieth century published very short stories. Critics used the phrase “magazine fiction” to disparage them. In a 1960 preface to Winesburg, Ohio, the collection of short stories by Sherwood Anderson, Malcolm Cowley writes:

American folk tales usually end with a “snapper,” that is, after starting with the plausible, they progress through the barely possible to the flatly incredible, then wait for a laugh. Magazine fiction used to follow—and much of it still does—a pattern leading to a different sort of snapper, one that calls for a gasp of surprise or relief instead of a guffaw. Anderson broke the pattern by writing stories that . . . had no plots in the usual sense. The tales he told in his Midwestern drawl were not incidents or episodes, they were moments, each complete in itself.

Some magazines and writing competitions ask for prose less than five hundred words, or less than three hundred. “Micro fiction” may amount to a paragraph or one sentence. There is even a vogue for “nano fiction,” from the Greek word for “dwarf.” The term “prose poem” is obsolete, as the overwhelming literary preference today is for free verse over rhymed and metrical poetry. Hearing a contemporary poem or a micro fiction read aloud, it can be hard to tell whether the piece is printed in lines or a block of type.

Bearing in mind published examples by Sherwood Anderson, O. Henry, Anton Chekhov, W. Somerset Maugham, Donald Barthelme, Woody Allen, and David Sedaris, I would define flash fiction as prose of up to 1500 words with a narrative structure. Unlike poetry which gets by on allusion, suggestion, odd grammar, and sound effects like repetition and rhythm, complete sentences are the rule. Prose makes an explicit statement, which may be true or absurd.

Flash fiction contains an event, an action, a shift, or a change, or in the bitter comic vein of Chekhov, it shows why change is impossible. I do not subscribe to the conflict theory of fiction. I believe a story shows a problem and seeks a solution. The narrative is this search, which is the human search for meaning. The search can succeed or fail. Some readers hail success as uplifting or inspirational, while failure strikes them as failure on the part of the writer. Other readers see a lack of closure, or the absence of a moral message, as a faithful reflection of the real world, the indifference of fate to human wishes.

The flash form is a good exercise for writers, as a first draft it can be completed in one or two sittings. Like poetry, flash benefits from images and metaphors, a few significant details, a sense of timing, and a command of language. The first sentence states the theme and sets the tone. The last sentence may or may not surprise, but it feels like the end. Everything in between contributes to the effect, and every word pulls its weight. To reach this ideal, the writer must ruthlessly cut and revise. Quick though it is to read, finished flash takes a long time to write.

Short satire has a venerable literary pedigree. Political screeds get attention in social media. Fantasy and fable are popular today. The realist variety is less common than it was in nineteenth-century newspapers. The New Yorker has printed flash. Some old-guard literary magazines in the United States accept it. Some relegate it to their online editions. Anthologies like Short Shorts of 1982, edited by Irving and Ilana Wiener Howe, and the Flash Fiction series that started in 1992, edited by Thomas, Hazuka, Shapard, Merrill, et al. reprint flash.

Flash fiction crosses boundaries, both international and literary. Here is a form that appeals to all readers and is open to all writers, at any stage of experience. What will they think of next?