Flash fiction  

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Flash fiction is a style of fictional literature or fiction of extreme brevity. There is no widely accepted definition of the length of the category. Some self-described markets for flash fiction impose caps as low as three hundred words, while others consider stories as long as a thousand words to be flash fiction.

Contents

Terms

One of the first known usages of the term "flash fiction" in reference to the literary style was the 1992 anthology Flash Fiction: Seventy-Two Very Short Stories. Editor James Thomas stated that the editors' definition of a "flash fiction" was a story that would fit on two facing pages of a typical digest-sized literary magazine. In China the style is frequently called a "smoke long" or "palm-sized" story, with the comparison being that the story should be finished before the reader could finish smoking a cigarette.

Other names for flash fiction include sudden fiction, micro fiction, micro-story, short short, postcard fiction and short short story, though distinctions are sometimes drawn between some of these terms; for example, sometimes one-thousand words is considered the cut-off between "flash fiction" and the slightly longer short story "sudden fiction". The terms "micro fiction" and "micro narrative" are sometimes defined as below 300 words.

The term "short short story" was the most common term until about 2000, when "flash fiction" overtook it.

History

Very short fiction has roots going back to Aesop's Fables, and practitioners have included Saadi of Shiraz ("Gulistan of Sa'di"), Bolesław Prus, Anton Chekhov, O. Henry, Franz Kafka, H.P. Lovecraft, Yasunari Kawabata, Ernest Hemingway, Julio Cortázar, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Fredric Brown. Examples of Hemingway's pioneering of the form are the 18 very short pieces in his first short-story collection, In Our Time. It is disputed whether (to win a bet), as alleged, he also wrote the flash fiction "For Sale, Baby Shoes, Never Worn".

The 'short short story' has been particularly popular in science fiction and mystery genres since the 1930s.

Hispanic literature has many authors of micro-stories, including Augusto Monterroso (whose "El dinosaurio" is often credited as one of the shortest stories ever written), and Luis Felipe Lomelí ("El Emigrante"). In Spain authors of microrrelatos (very short fictions) have included Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, Andrés NeumanRamón Gómez de la Serna, José Jiménez Lozano, Javier Tomeo, José María Merino, Juan José Millás, and Óscar Esquivias.

Italo Calvino consciously searched for a short narrative form, drawing inspiration from Argentine writers Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares and finding that Monterroso's was "the most perfect he could find"; "El dinosaurio", in turn, possibly inspired his "The Dinosaurs".

In France and Francophone countries, micronouvelles have been popularized by authors such as Jacques Fuentealba, Vincent Bastin, Olivier Gechter, Stephane Bataillon and Laurent Berthiaume.

In German, authors of Kürzestgeschichten, influenced by brief narratives penned by Bertolt Brecht and Franz Kafka, have included Peter Bichsel, Heimito von Doderer, Günter Kunert and Helmut Heißenbüttel.

In the Arab world, the famous Naguib Mahfouz is one of the most able flash fiction writers. After the years of silence that followed him being stabbed twice in the neck, Mahfouz was unable to maintain his memory and use his hand. Accordingly he resorted to mastering flash fiction. He wrote some of the most astounding short stories before his death using this technique.

Internet presence

Access to the Internet has had an impact on the awareness of flash fiction, with websites and zines such as Flash Fiction Online being devoted entirely to the style. Author Paulo Coelho remarked that the "democratization of communication offered by the Internet has made positive in-roads" and directly influenced the style's popularity.

Vignette

Unlike a vignette, flash fiction often contains the classic story elements: protagonist, conflict, obstacles or complications, and resolution. However, unlike a traditional short story, the limited word length often forces some of these elements to remain unwritten - that is, hinted at or implied in the written storyline. Different readers thus may have different interpretations.

See also





Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Flash fiction" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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