Flash Fiction

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.

In one particular format, established by Steve Moss, editor of San Luis Obispo New Times, the requirement is 55 words; no more and no fewer. Another, unspecified but frequently held, requirement is that the title may be no more than seven words. Hyphens do not alter the word-count ( ...more

Most Read This Week Tagged "Flash Fiction"

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Lists

"Of Words" series

5 books — 1 voter

The Hobbit, or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling

Works of Pure Genius

727 books — 576 voters

Amazing Short Stories

166 books — 137 voters

Best Short Stories (Not Collections!)

5 books — 5 voters

Beautiful, Complicated Family by Rosey Lee

Netherworld and Other Stories by Steven Bruce

Chimaera and Other Stories by Steven Bruce

Best Short Stories and Flash Fiction Stories

38 books — 32 voters

The Ice Cream Vendor's Song by Laura McHale Holland

To Carry Her Home by Bath Flash Fiction Award

Best Flash Fiction Collections

54 books — 61 voters

Related Genres

Fiction
Short Stories
Ficțion
Fiçtion

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Quotes Tagged “Flash Fiction”

“ The usual short story cannot have a complex plot, but it often has a simple one resembling a chain with two or three links. The short short, however, doesn't as a rule have even that much - you don't speak of a chain when there's only one link. ... Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short. Everything depe The usual short story cannot have a complex plot, but it often has a simple one resembling a chain with two or three links. The short short, however, doesn't as a rule have even that much - you don't speak of a chain when there's only one link. ... Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short. Everything depends on intensity, one sweeping blow of perception. In the short short the writer gets no second chance. Either he strikes through at once or he's lost. And because it depends so heavily on this one sweeping blow, the short short often approaches the condition of a fable. When you read the two pieces by Tolstoy in this book, or I.L. Peretz's 'If Not Higher,' or Franz Kafka's 'The Hunter Gracchus,' you feel these writers are intent upon 'making a point' - but obliquely, not through mere statement. What they project is not the sort of impression of life we expect in most fiction, but something else: an impression of an idea of life. Or: a flicker in darkness, a slight cut of being. The shorter the piece of writing, the more abstract it may seem to us. In reading Paz's brilliant short short we feel we have brushed dangerously against the sheer arbitrariness of existence; in reading Peretz's, that we have been brought up against a moral reflection on the nature of goodness, though a reflection hard merely to state. Could we say that the short short is to other kinds of fiction somewhat as the lyric is to other kinds of poetry? The lyric does not seek meaning through extension, it accepts the enigmas of confinement. It strives for a rapid unity of impression, an experience rendered in its wink of immediacy. And so too with the short short. ... Writers who do short shorts need to be especially bold. They stake everything on a stroke of inventiveness. Sometimes they have to be prepared to speak out directly, not so much in order to state a theme as to provide a jarring or complicating commentary. The voice of the writer brushes, so to say, against his flash of invention. And then, almost before it begins, the fiction is brought to a stark conclusion - abrupt, bleeding, exhausting. This conclusion need not complete the action; it has only to break it off decisively. Here are a few examples of the writer speaking out directly. Paz: 'The universe is a vast system of signs.' Kafka in 'First Sorrow': The trapeze artist's 'social life was somewhat limited.' Paula Fox: 'We are starving here in our village. At last, we are at the center.' Babel's cossack cries out, 'You guys in specs have about as much pity for chaps like us as a cat for a mouse.' Such sentences serve as devices of economy, oblique cues. Cryptic and enigmatic, they sometimes replace action, dialogue and commentary, for none of which, as it happens, the short short has much room. There's often a brilliant overfocussing. ("Introduction") ...more ”
― Irving Howe, Short Shorts

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“ The security guard asked me what I was doing in the park at 2am. I told him I was burying a body. He didn’t seem happy with that. He was so unhappy that he reached for his gun and his walkie-talkie at the same time. This was his undoing. He never saw the shovel coming. Now one more body cluttered the landscaped lawn. I hoped I had enough lime to cover both of them. I’d found the instructions online. Same place as the instructions on how to make your own zombie. Those hadn’t worked. But the night ...more ”
― John West, Tales from the Crying Room - 3 twisted short stories, 20 short short stories, and a play

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