Flash Fiction

Flash Fiction: short short stories

Storytelling has been around since prehistoric times, producing a rich oral tradition that was translated onto paper when humans learnt to write.

By the 18th – 19th century, the short story had become a popular form of reading entertainment.

The tradition continued into the 1920s and 1930s with anthologies and collections of short works by various emerging or established authors, including :

• In Our Time (1925) by Ernest Hemingway
• Cosmopolitans: Very Short Stories (1936) by Somerset Maugham.

Some of these stories might be just a hundred words long, yet can deliver a distinct narrative and atmosphere.

Flash Fiction Online

Greater awareness of flash fiction stories has developed with the arrival of the internet. Flash fiction continues to be a valuable medium for both published and unpublished writers, as both an exercise and a way of developing their voice and making themselves known to fresh readers. Several online websites are dedicated to flash fiction, for example, Flash Fiction Online and Word Riot, which publish new material monthly.

Flash Fiction: examples

There are various types of flash fiction depending on the length of the story, and they can be roughly divided up as follows:

• Short story (up to 7,500 words)
• Sudden fiction (usually a little over 1000 words)
• Short short story or flash fiction (up to around 1000 words)
• Postcard fiction (between 250 and 500 words, or as much as can fit on a postcard!)
• Micro-fiction (usually under 300 words)

On average, the classic short story stays within the 7,500 words mark; anything longer becomes a novella, a novel or a book.

• Mark Twain's humorous 'A Telephonic Conversation' (1880) is 810 words long and qualifies as flash fiction or a short short story.
• 'The Open Window' (1911) by H. H. Munro, otherwise known as Saki, is 1,214 words long and could be called an example of sudden fiction.
• Kate Chopin's 'Dr Chevalier's Lie' (1891) is 385 words long and could be called an example of postcard fiction (although we don't know whether she intended it for that purpose!)
• Kate Chopin's 'Blind Man' (1897) is 755 words long and can be labelled either a short short story or flash fiction.
• In a paragraph of only 128 words, Franz Kafka's microfiction 'Give It Up' (1936) creates the eerie sense of a dream gone wrong.

Microfiction

Microfiction can be further subdivided into three categories:

• A trabble: a story of maximum, or exactly, 300 words.
• A drabble: a story of exactly 100 words.
• A dribble, also called a minisaga: a story of exactly 50 words with a title made up of 15 characters.

The drabble has spawned more specific terms of precise lengths:

• A Pentadrabble: exactly 500 words long.
• A double drabble or drouble: exactly 200 words long.
• The trabble, also called a tribble or trouble: exactly 300 words long (for the purists!)

So, our mini ghost story from the beginning of this article could qualify as a work of microfiction, as it is less than 300 words long; but we could also call it a dribble, as it is actually shorter than 50 words!

Microfiction has grown in popularity, with websites and magazines dedicated to the art of writing a whole story in less than 500 words, or as few as 55 words.

On the 55Fiction submissions page, the editors of New Times clarify that a story must have :

• Setting.
• Character(s).
• Conflict.
• Resolution.

They also include the following example, 'Bedtime Story' by Jeffrey Whitmore:

Flash Fiction in Fandom

Media Fandom adopted drabbles in the 1990s. Some examples include:

• The X–Files

• Sherlock Holmes

• Blake’s 7

The X–Files

In 1998, The X–Files writer Brandon D. Ray wrote a 155-word-long short story called '155 or the Shortest MSR (Mulder-Scully Romance) Ever Written.' This triggered a trend within The X–Files fanfiction community for ‘155 word’ stories.

221B

These are Sherlock Holmes fanfic stories of exactly 221 words, the last word of which must begin with 'B'. 221B derives from 221B Baker Street, the address of Sherlock Holmes.

7 x 7

The name 7 x 7 is derived from Blake’s 7, and the challenge for the fanfiction community is to write stories that are exactly 49 words long.

Contemporary Microfiction

Once you reach microscopic tales that manage to epitomise a whole narrative without any set-up or plot, these could include six-word-stories, hint fiction, or twitterature.

Six-word-stories

This intriguing example of microfiction has been attributed to Hemingway, although there is no direct evidence to prove that he wrote it. For instance, it may also be a variant on article headings from the 1920s and 1930s, such as 'Baby carriage for sale. Never used' from the newspaper: Brooklyn Home Talk, 1921.

Hint Fiction

Whether Hemingway wrote it or not, the idea of six words telling a story inspired Robert Swartwood to create an anthology of stories each no longer than 25 words. He termed these 'hint fiction' – stories written in 25 words that suggest or ‘hint at’ bigger and more complex stories.

Hint fiction has since become a popular genre in its own right, with several websites dedicating a page or more to it, including Nanoism, Narrativemagazine, and Monkeybicyle.

One example of hint fiction from Monkeybicycle includes 'Dandelions Actually' (2011) by R. Gatwood:

The six-word story has also fostered the movement Six-Word Memoirs by the online magazine Smith, which challenges people to sum up their lives in six words. On Twitter, people can share #MicroMemoirs or pivotal moments and memories from their lives.

Twitterature

Twitterature is a portmanteau of Twitter and literature, comprising poems and fiction of up to 280 characters. It can include:

• Mini-sagas.
• Dribbles.
• Drabbles.
• Six-word-stories.

Other genres are given Twitter treatment too.

An interactive Twitter poetry contest from May 2009 was won by Simon Brake with the following entry:

Flash Fiction: purpose

Over the centuries, the short story has survived to act as a quick, convenient way to entertain and convey a feeling, an idea, or an explanation that can help the reader make a little more sense out of life. More recently called flash fiction, it has continued to inform, engage and entertain new audiences in an increasingly fast-paced world.

With the internet, brevity and speed have taken priority, and social media platforms such as Twitter encourage writers to focus on making the most impact with the fewest words.

¹ Jeffrey Whitmore, 'Bedtime Story'. The World’s Shortest Stories, ed. Steve Moss, 1998.