When is a short story not a short story?

I began writing short stories in mid 2012. At least I thought that my compositions where short stories (I knew of no other means of describing them), however I now realise that many of my compositions are, in fact flash fiction (a term wholly unfamiliar to me until comparatively recently). Wikipedia describes flash fiction as follows

“Flash fiction is a style of fictional literature or

fiction

of extreme brevity.

[1]

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”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_fiction

I have never consciously aimed at producing flash fiction (indeed, as mentioned above I was unaware of the label until quite recently) but many of my stories none the less fall into this category. See, for example my story entitled Chicken, http://newauthoronline.com/2013/09/15/chicken/. To be frank I haven’t counted the words but I guess that they total 1000 give or take a few either way!

Other stories most definitely can not be classified as flash fiction. Rather they fall into the category of short story, (see, for instance my long short story, Samantha which runs to approximately 29 pages, http://www.amazon.com/Samantha-ebook/dp/B00BL3CNHI).

To the best of my recollection all of my flash fiction has been composed in one sitting while my short stories have been written over a longer time-frame (Samantha was written over a period of several months).

To me it is irrelevant whether a composition is, technically a piece of flash fiction or a short story. What matters is that the story gives pleasure and (hopefully) causes people to think about the world in which they live. If I can achieve that in a thousand words or less then all well and good, however if it takes longer to convey my “message” (if that doesn’t sound too pompous)! Then that, also is absolutely fine. Ultimately it is the production of a meaningful tale which matters rather than how many words I as a writer have churned out.