Fiction in a Flash

I found an interesting site at Writing-World.com and thought it may be of interest to other aspiring writers. This particular article I’ve highlighted attempts to answer the question how long your story should be. Of late I have been keenly interested in attempting “flash fiction,” which allows for no more than 1,000 words, although 750 words is the preferred length. Growing in popularity is “micro-fiction” with a maximum word count of about 100, which sounds to me like the haiku of prose.

Katharine Brush

My very first exposure to what we today call flash fiction was the brilliant short story “The Birthday Party,” by Katharine Brush. The term “flash fiction” wasn’t in vogue then (it was written in 1946) and until the moment I was introduced to it I had never before read such a short, short story. But wow! What a powerful story it is; packed with such big emotions in so few words (314 in total). It still haunts me. Read it here.

I was again acquainted with sudden fiction in the early 1990s with a wicked collection of absurd stories in, “Wearing Dad’s Head,” by Barry Yourgrau. His book has been re-released through Amazon.com where you can find it and other works by Yourgrau, including his break-out book “A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane” and the outstanding “Sadness of Sex.”

There are scores of sites on the Web featuring examples of flash fiction, but I direct your attention to a couple of sites I thought worthy: FlashFictionOnline.com and the blog site FlashFiction.net.