Flash Fiction

As its name implies Flash Fiction can be loosely defined as stories of strikingly short length. As the popularity of the genre has grown and become fit for more academic analysis, other terms for Flash Fiction have developed such as Nano Fiction, Sudden Fiction and Short Fiction. Most Flash Fiction has either a stated or implied narrative. This is perhaps the reason for its growing popularity. It can tell a comprehensible story with a notable lyricism. Despite the extreme brevity of Flash Fiction, in the hands of a skilled writer pieces may also have fully realised characters.

Of course, extremely short fiction has been with us for thousands of years – think of Aesop’s Fables or indeed Biblical Parables. Origins of what we now call Flash Fiction can be discovered in the work of nineteenth-century writers such as Walt Whitman and Kate Chopin.

How then can we identify a story that is Flash Fiction? The answer is that there is no easy definition. Normally, as already mentioned, Flash Fiction is known for its brevity. Flash Fiction stories can range from as little as six words to as many as 1000 words. The famous six-word story reads as following: ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’ This very short story has usually – but incorrectly – been attributed to Ernest Hemingway, but work to trace its origins are ongoing.

Perhaps the most well-known proponent of modern Flash Fiction is the American author Lydia Davis, born in 1947. Her stories – usually less than a page long - have a dramatic immediacy as they are generally written in medias res. In 2013, Davis won the Man Booker prize, and her collection of stories, published in 2014, Can’t and Won’t consisted of over 122 stories. Her ‘Everybody Cries’ was part of The New Yorker’s Flash Fiction series. In the story adults become toddlers who are overwhelmed by everything in their lives – reducing them to tears. You can read ‘Everybody Cries’ here.

If Lydia Davis has captured your imagination, Paul McDonald’s book Lydia Davis: A Study can be purchased here. Or, instead, if you are interested in Flash Fiction more generally, The Enigmas of Confinement: A History and Poetics of Flash Fiction, also by Paul McDonald, is available here.