Flash Fiction

Introduction

The publication since about 1980 of popular anthologies of extremely short stories, or “flash fiction,” has led many critics to argue that these extremely short stories, typically less than one thousand words, represent a new genre, or at least subgenre, of contemporary fiction. The term “flash fiction” was probably coined by James Thomas, who coedited two anthologies of very short stories under that label in 1992 and 2006. He defined the term as including stories between about three hundred and eight hundred words to differentiate them from other collections devoted to the somewhat longer “sudden fiction” (limited to two thousand words) and the somewhat shorter “microfiction” (limited to three hundred words). The term serves more generally as a label for any very short fiction of under about two thousand words. In the digital age dominated by the Internet and social media, flash fiction has experienced a renaissance, as it is well suited to the often-short attention spans people in the twenty-first century possess. 

Background

Although such short verbal forms as the parable, exemplum, fabliau, and fable have been practiced widely and more or less continuously for millennia, and short poetic forms such as the sonnet, haiku, and epigram have been recognized as prestigious genres, serious criticism of very short prose works was slow to develop. The depreciation of very short works begins at least as early as Aristotle’s stipulation in his De poetica (c. 334-323 b.c.e.; Poetics, 1705) that size does matter: “Beauty is a matter of size and order, and therefore impossible . . . in a very minute creature . . . the longer the story, consistently with its being comprehensible as a whole, the finer it is by reason of its magnitude.” Edgar Allan Poe, even though he was among the first great short-story writers in English, concurred about the limitations of works that are “too brief. He noted, “Without a certain continuity of effort—without a certain duration or repetition of purpose—the soul is never deeply moved.” In addition, he commented that “a certain degree of duration is absolutely requisite for the production of any effect at all.” Poe himself believed that even a short story should take at least half an hour to read.

Granting a handful of exceptions from innovative authors such as Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway (“A Very Short Story,” “The Revolutionist”), Gertrude Stein (1914’s Tender Buttons), and Virginia Woolf (“Monday or Tuesday”), stories brief enough to be considered flash fiction were fairly rare before a notable boom in the “short short” story for American magazines from the 1920s through the 1940s. The label “short short story” seems to have been coined by Collier’s Weekly, which began printing half-page narratives (roughly one thousand to two thousand words) on September 12, 1925, and was picked up by numerous other magazines. A series of anthologies and handbooks devoted to short-shorts were published from 1947 to 1951. Still, they were followed by a twenty-five-year period of almost no interest in the form, suggesting little direct continuity between these midcentury short-shorts and the postmodern flash fictions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The Rise of Flash Fiction

The spike in the production and consumption of very short stories at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries might suggest that particular historical and social factors, not just formal or generic literary considerations, have influenced the development of flash fiction. During the last decades of the twentieth century, modern society became prolific in miniature art forms, such as postcards, pop songs (and accompanying videos), television commercials, and bumper stickers. In the twenty-first century, the Internet and social media have added to this with sites like X (formerly Twitter), where users are relegated to a certain number of characters to express their thoughts. Some observers see the surge in flash fiction within this context as one more effect of the allegedly widespread and increasing deficiencies in the attention spans of contemporary consumers of cultural productions of all types. Most critics agree that the revival of flash fiction is likely related closely to the prevalence of mobile devices and Internet use. The technologies began to emerge at their very basic beginnings at about the same time—late 1970s to early 1980s—that flash-fiction anthologies began to flood the market. Some subtypes of flash fiction are almost certainly dictated, or at least enabled, by historical and technological rather than strictly formal factors, and flash fictions fit well on the screens of computers and even smaller electronic devices. The Japanese phenomenon of mobile phone novels, keitai shosetsu, which also includes microstories, seems to be a response to the long daily commutes of many young Japanese workers, especially women: reading from a mobile phone screen inches from your face on a packed commuter train offers a uniquely modern combination of technology and art. As with the less successful phenomenon of “Twitter fiction,” constraints on the formal and even thematic characteristics of such “microblogging” derive from factors such as technology (X narratives were once limited to 140 characters) and demographics (using mobile phones for Internet access still being more common for readers in their teens and twenties).

Something of an academic canon of miniature stories has begun to coalesce, including such familiar anthology pieces as Raymond Carver’s “Popular Mechanics” (434 words), Julio Cortázar’s “A Continuity of Parks” (639 words), Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel” (324 words), and Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” (660 words). The appearance of college courses in flash fiction and scholarly criticism of the genre has probably helped to cement its popularity. Vestal Review, the first magazine dedicated exclusively to flash fiction, has been published continuously since March 2000, and several online sites currently specialize in publishing very short stories. Subtypes of flash fiction include 6S (stories limited to six sentences), Four-Minute Fictions and Minute Stories (defined by their average reading time), and the World’s Shortest Stories series of fifty-five-word fictions, among others. This level of popular success has inspired many editors and critics to claim that flash fiction may be the distinctive literary form of the twenty-first century.

As the twenty-first century progressed, flash fiction remained popular thanks to the digital age. Authors have increasingly turned to the literary form to engross audiences who cannot commit to long-form writing. Flash fiction has taken on literary significance, with authors proving that a short format does not mean the narrative and themes cannot be developed, or the story cannot be compelling. Online flash fiction platforms and literary journals have allowed flash fiction to flourish in the mid-2020s. 

Six Characteristics of Flash Fiction

The most systematic analysis of narrative brevity is Norman Friedman’s classic 1958 essay “What Makes a Short Story Short?” He focuses on the plot, reasoning that larger and more complex actions require longer stretches of narrative discourse to recount. He argued that the action dealt with in a very short story may be static or dynamic but is likely to be small. However, Friedman developed his theoretical position about twenty years too early to have encountered the flash-fiction phenomenon, and his prediction that the plot would eventually reach something like a narrative absolute zero in the very short work, with a depiction of a completely static scene, turns out to be wrong. Flash fictions often do present a single scene or speech (as Friedman correctly anticipated). Still, they are not normally restricted to small, static actions. The typical microstory action is large, with major changes and reversals as the rule rather than the technical impossibility that Friedman expected. Rather than narrowing down steadily from large dynamic actions to tiny static states, the very short story abruptly reverses that tendency beneath a certain length, and the actions narrated zoom back out to full size. The sixty-two 240-word microstories of Robert Olen Butler’s Severance (2006), for example, are all told by narrators who have just been beheaded, perhaps as dynamic and significant an action as might be available to a human being. This seemingly unlikely combination of large actions presented in few words can characterize even the shortest stories. Hemingway’s famous (and probably apocryphal) claim that his best work was a story of just six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” An even shorter story, widely cited in discussions of the form, is Julius Caesar’s “veni, vidi, vici” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”), which narrates an action that hardly could be larger or more dynamic. The genre of the fable offers instructive parallels: Despite their brevity, fables usually depict powerful desires and grave consequences.

Another fundamental distinction to be drawn between flash fiction and short stories lies in the development of characters. Critics agree that one mark of a short story is a fully delineated character: Classic short stories are impressionistic dramas of sensation and inner experience, moral choice, and psychological emergence or growth; outward action is normally subordinated to inward feeling. As Mary Louise Pratt has noticed, short stories are often used to depict childhood experiences. In flash fiction, however, characters are usually anonymous adults of unspecified age, as the development of psychologically nuanced three-dimensional characters with individual histories simply requires too many words. Character flattens out and recedes as circumstance becomes dominant. As Irving Howe observes in introducing his anthology of very short stories, “Situation tends to replace character, representative condition to replace individuality.” The characters in a typical flash fiction are both literally and figuratively anonymous, not just nameless but without individualized identities or personalities. The nuances of individual perception and psychology become irrelevant. It does not matter what people are in the situation because they will be powerless to do anything about it anyway; their feelings about it will not help them. Fate goes as it must, as the epics say.

A third feature of the classic short story is a closely observed and detailed setting. While short stories often use this density of detail metonymically and realistically, they are particularly apt to use it metaphorically and impressionistically. In flash fiction, however, one seldom sees distinctive physical settings: Generalized and ordinary spaces, such as cars and hotel rooms, eliminate the need for minute descriptions. Again, this seems closely tied to the word count: Giving thickness to the setting requires more words than relying on generic spaces. In much flash fiction, the setting is almost entirely unspecified and virtually blank, creating a thematic implication that the characters are trapped in limited spaces with nowhere else to go.

The fourth broad difference between short stories and flash fiction is how they handle time. The time span covered in a microstory is usually extremely brief, often limited to no more than a few minutes. The lack of background further foregrounds the effect of such short duration: The typically flat characters rarely have much of a personal history, so their lives are virtually coextensive with the narratives told about them, discouraging much consideration of what precedes and follows the narrated events. Furthermore, temporality is usually linear in microfiction, unlike the frequently distorted chronology of the short story. Although both genres often begin in medias res, the short story provides typically expository flashbacks to close informational gaps and explain motives. Microfiction, however, rarely extends its time frame with flashbacks, focusing instead on the present. Just as the restricted settings in flash fiction often seem to enclose characters physically, these temporal restrictions can box in characters by depriving them of pasts and futures. The result is a general sense that the characters’ circumstances and the world they live in are cramped or stunted psychologically, physically, and temporally. As Charles Baxter puts it, the future has narrowed, become so small a tunnel that no one feels like crawling into it.

A fifth distinction between flash fiction and short stories is their propensity to cite other texts: The microstory frequently introduces an explicit or implicit intertextual reference, sometimes taken from popular culture or history, sometimes from literary sources. Of course, longer works may take advantage of intertextuality as well. Still, even though the distinction in this instance is a matter of degree, that difference in degree is notable enough to have attracted critical attention. The intertexts in Carver’s “Popular Mechanics,” a paradigmatic flash fiction in many ways, extend from the title’s allusion to Popular Mechanics, the stereotypical magazine of the contented suburban dad, to the final biblical echo of Solomon’s ploy to find a baby’s true parent (Kings 1:3; in Carver, of course, neither parent is a true one and the baby apparently will be sacrificed to their petty self-absorption). Not surprisingly, the most common literary intertexts are William Shakespeare’s plays, especially Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601, pb. 1603), and biblical stories, especially the Adam and Eve episode from Genesis), but cinematic examples abound as well. One common—and economical—way to introduce an intertext is through the title, as a few examples selected from recent anthologies will demonstrate: “Gertrude’s Soliloquy,” “The Britches of Madison County,” “Welcome to Graceland,” “The Tablecloth of Turin,” “Salem, 1692.” Such intertexts can greatly increase the functional or interpretive reach of a story by combining it with a story or a set of characters already familiar to readers; with the briefest of allusions, a writer can, in effect, add cues, contexts, and even entire narratives without adding length, since most of the extra words are found in the reader’s head rather than on the page. In many cases, the cultural intertext exists almost entirely between the lines.

Closure marks the sixth difference between short stories and flash fiction. As with the presence of intertexts, this category is also a matter of degree. However, while the short story has come to rely more and more on openness and lack of closure, flash fiction seems to have remained relatively “closed” by comparison. It may well be that a reader needs more information to assess the thrust and import of an open plot. One additional aspect of the plot of flash fictions is their frequent reliance on surprise endings, perhaps a necessary consequence of their brevity. Among the most common plot twists are such simple devices as setting up and then reversing expectations about the ages or gender of the characters. Although abrupt or unexpected endings may be found in longer stories, the device is more common in microstories, especially for the recent period during which the microstory has become a major genre. Indeed, for many critics, the twist ending is usually an artistic flaw in a short story. One difference may be that flash fiction is so rapidly read that the reader does not have time to reflect upon and anticipate the ending.

Bibliography

Balkovek, Corin. “21 Flash Fiction Stories to Read While You Wait Anywhere.” Book Riot, 18 June 2020, bookriot.com/flash-fiction-stories. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024.

Friedman, Norman. “What Makes a Short Story Short?” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 4, 1958, pp. 103-117.

Hoffman, Michael J., and Patrick D. Murphy, editors. Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988.

Howe, Irving. “Introduction.” In Short Shorts: An Anthology of the Shortest Stories, edited by Irving Howe and Ilana Wiener Howe. Boston: David R. Godine, 1982.

Masih, Tara L., editor. The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field. Brookline, Mass.: Rose Metal Press, 2009.

May, Charles E., editor. The New Short Story Theories. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994.

Pandey, Swati, and Kyla D. Walker. “The State of Flash Fiction.” Electric Literature, 28 Dec. 2016, electricliterature.com/the-state-of-flash-fiction. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024.

Parry, Alan. “The Revival of Flash Fiction: A Brief Overview of an Enduring Literary Form.” The Broken Spine, 3 Oct. 2023, thebrokenspine.co.uk/2023/10/03/the-revival-of-flash-fiction-a-brief-overview-of-an-enduring-literary-form. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024.

Shapard, Robert, and James Thomas, editors. Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories. Salt Lake City: Gibbs-Smith, 1986.

Wallace, Ron. “Writers Try Short Shorts!” The Writer’s Chronicle, vol. 33, no. 6, 2001, pp. 40-44.