Our free flash fiction competitions are attracting plenty of interest so I thought it would be handy to provide some background information on the genre - and dispense some handy hints.
Flash fiction is fiction of extreme brevity. The standard, generally-accepted length of a flash fiction piece is 1000 words or less. A short-short (it’s all a movable feast!) measures 1001 words to 2500 words, and a traditional short story measures 2501 to 7500 words. A novelette runs from 7501 words to 17,500, a novella 17,501 words to 40,000 words, and a novel 40,001 words and up
Other names for flash fiction include sudden fiction, microfiction, micro-story, postcard fiction, and short short story
The term ‘flash fiction‘ may have originated from a 1992 anthology of that title.
As the editors said in their introduction, their definition of a ‘flash fiction‘ was a story that would fit on two facing pages of a typical digest-sized literary magazine, or about 750 words.
However, the genre goes back much longer than that and flash fiction has its roots in Aesop’s fables. Practitioners have included Anton Chekhov, Ray Bradbury, Franz Kafka and Kurk Vonnegut.
The Internet has brought new life to the genre through its demand for short, concise pieces of writing - blogs and the like are brilliant disciplines for writers (especially given that over-writing is one of the biggest problems for many authors. The good ones are brutal enough to cut much-loved scenes, characters and phrases if they detract from the flow of the story).
One type of flash fiction is the short story with an exact word count, a word either way and it is disqualified. Types include:
Nanofictions, complete stories, with at least one character and a discernible plot, exactly 55 words long.
Drabbles, exactly 100 words, excluding titles
69ers - exactly 69 words, excluding the title. The 69er was a regular feature of the Canadian literary magazine NFG.
So how short can a flash fiction be? Well, it is alleged that the greatest example was written by Ernest Hemingway in response to a challenge in a bar. While it seems certain that Hemingway did not write it, the following six word story is truly brilliant - moving, emotional with a back story and you can see the characters. For sale: baby shoes, never worn. Good writing should trigger something in your reader; because of a sad event in our family life those six words never fail to evoke emotion.
Here’s some tips for writing flash fiction.
Write the story without worrying about the word count and make sure that it has all the necessary story elements. Just because it is short does not mean plot, conflict and resolution are lost
Having written it, start cutting. Keep dialogue short, description sparse. Take out every word that is not essential (a good rule for any kind of writing).
Start in the middle of the story (another good rule for general fiction) Plunge the reader directly into the action.
Ask yourself what the reader absolutely needs to know. Ok, so she’s wearing a pink top but do we need to know anything more? Or does it matter that she’s wearing a pink top at all? If yes, keep it in, if no, hit the delete button.
Make every word count. Each word has a job to do: do your words do their job? If yes, keep them in, if not - well, you know the rest!
* We have launched our latest free flash fiction competition. Prize £50. You can enter and find out more at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Inscribemedia/183385438479538
John Dean
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