Flash Fiction: The Art of Concision
Originally published as the Introduction for Fast Forward’s anthology of flash fiction, The Incredible Shrinking Story (Fast Forward Press, 2011)
Having been an editor for the Fast Forward flash fiction anthologies for the past four years, people often ask me the question, “What is flash fiction?” Sure, short stories have been around for centuries, but the genre dubbed “flash fiction” is still new enough that many people want a definition.
The simplest answer is just that it is a very short story. How short depends on who you ask — some publications consider flash fiction to be any story under 2,000 words, others say 200. At Fast Forward Press, we use 1,000 as our word limit. Why? Because we had to stop somewhere.
But here’s the catch: It needs to be authentically short. It is not a summary of a longer story, or a hasty overview of a character’s entire life. Flash fiction begins and ends within a couple pages. It is not a long story crammed into a tiny form like a grown woman trying to squeeze into her four-year-old’s tutu and pass herself off as a child ballerina. Brevity has nothing to do with the story’s purpose, it just happens to be the common trait of this genre.
After considering the word count, it’s really just a matter of how good the story is at engaging its readers. Like a little ant carrying something fifty times its size, the strength of a flash story must be able to stand up against any length piece. And the best ones can make you feel like you have experienced as much plot, character, meaning, and mystery as found in an entire novel, in a mere page.
To successfully create more meaning than would intuitively be thought possible in such a short space, flash fiction often relies on the tools of ambiguity and implication to engage its readers. The words the author chooses not to write are equally as important as the ones they do.
One of my favorite flash pieces is Raymond Carver’s story, “Popular Mechanics” (from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love), where he gives no background, shows an intense moment unfolding in real time, and then ends it in a terrifyingly ambiguous way. As readers, we have no choice but to be left in a state of enthrallment because we are haunted by all the things we don’t know — all the possible outcomes that our brains involuntarily, morbidly fantasize about.
Ernest Hemingway’s famous 6-worder, “For sale: baby shoes, never used,” is an excellent example of the power of implication. In this piece, he gives just enough information to force us to imagine the back-story. Most people immediately assume that something tragic has happened, even though nothing has been made explicit. It is merely implied by the set up of a situation that feels off; our brains do all the work.
I choose pieces for our anthologies that are memorable to me. The ones that have, in no more than a few minutes, ingrained themselves into my mind. The greatest flash fiction stories are the ones that you can’t even remember the length of because the only thing that matters is how much of an impact they had on you.
And that brings me to our latest collection of 59 stories, all of which I am thrilled to be presenting. As you read through these pages, you will find that the stories are arranged from the longest to the shortest. We have designed the collection this way in order to bring attention to how they maintain strength even though each one uses fewer words than the one before it. If you flip through the pages, you will see the length of the text physically shrink — thus our title: The Incredible Shrinking Story.
Our collection begins with Rob Geisen’s 1,000 word story, “The Night I Discovered That I’m Not as Cool as Han Solo,” which is a perfect way to show how a strong narrative voice can carry the momentum of a piece. When I originally read it, it didn’t occur to me that it was the longest story in the collection because the energy is so potent from start to finish.
Following in the footsteps of Hemingway, Michael Flatt’s 6-word story, “Seven Cock-rings Later,” ends our anthology with exquisite precision. Flatt employs the full capacity of implication by giving information that is counter-intuitive and forcing his readers to ponder in what possible universe this scenario could actually exist. I love the way it is a story because it implies a story, with a choose-your-own-adventure style of freedom for readers to imagine the background for this very bizarre reality.
Michael Flatt’s entire story:
Seven cock-rings later, she kissed me.
The moment a story gets us to think, it has won. This is why implication and ambiguity are often the greatest tools we have to inspire our reader’s imagination beyond the mere walls of the word count. Engagement is the ultimate goal of any piece of writing, and flash fiction has to make it happen a whole lot quicker. It is in this way that it has set itself apart from other literary genres, and it is for this reason that it has made an art form out of concision.
Now, I welcome you to come inside the world of flash fiction, where stories are much larger than they appear, and allow us to take you on a fantastic journey across the impossibly vast pages of The Incredible Shrinking Story.
Cheers to you and to the infinite number of outcomes of 26 letters,
-Kona Morris, February 2011
