Website stats are wonderful things, although they can steal
a huge amount of time as you puzzle over what it is that made one post more
popular than another, or why people click on one link you posted but not the
one next to it. Anyway, I’ve noticed that a fair bit of traffic to this site
has been coming from Guernsey recently, and just in case that’s down to people
reading about next month’s Flash Fiction workshop and wondering what exactly
that might involve, I thought I’d post something to elaborate on the subject. I
hope it helps.
I was originally going to call this post “A Guide to Flash
Fiction”, or something similar, but realised this would be misleading. For a
start, having a guide to something suggests that thing is fixed, that it can be
defined and whatever you say about it can be proven, or at least backed up with
plenty of evidence. You could write a guide to a town, for instance, and
although people could debate whether or not you’ve highlighted the best or most
important aspects of the town in question, it’s very unlikely that somebody
would come along and say that you’re actually writing about the wrong place
entirely, or that what you’ve described as historic shop fronts are in fact
modern factories.
Flash fiction isn’t easy to pin down. As a definition, it
isn’t fixed - it warps and changes according to individual interpretations. It
goes by several aliases, too – short-short stories, microfiction, quick reads,
coffee time stories, etc, etc, depending on the market for which it’s intended.
And flash fiction can also be taken to mean fast fiction - stories and other
creative writing produced within a set length of time, typically half an hour or
so. This alternative definition (with the “flash” referring to the speed of the writing,
rather than the reading, part of the process) can be a useful means of generating
ideas and the occasional killer line, but for me work produced in this way can
only ever be a first draft, it never feels like a finished article. So, I’m
focusing on the more usual interpretation, with the emphasis on the number of
words rather than the speed of the story’s creation. As an example of this, my
story, Falling From Grace, which won
the October TxtLit competition last year, is 28 words long but took nearly a whole
day to write.
So, where does the boundary lie between short fiction and
flash fiction? Opinions vary. Basically, there is no hard and fast rule that
states a story is flash up to a certain word count and a short story above that
length – in the same way as there is not really a clear definition of how much
longer a novel is than a novella. However, I think it’s safe to say that if a
story is a thousand words or less (very approximately two sides of A4 in a
normal-sized font), nobody's going to object to you
calling that flash fiction. Every Day Fiction and FlashFictionOnline are two
online publications that work to this definition. Other places are a bit more
stringent – the annual Biscuit Publishing Flash Fiction competition specifies
stories no longer than 750 words, and Flash500, as the name suggests, wants 500
words or less. There’s no real consensus, so it’s probably better to forget a
specific size and just think 'short'.
However many words there are in your flash fiction, the main
thing to bear in mind is that it should still be a story. That means it has a beginning, a middle, and an end –
although they don’t necessarily have to be in that order, and they don’t always
need to be explicitly spelled out in the text itself (sometimes there isn’t
room for this anyway, and you have to rely on subtle hints that allow the
reader to fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle).
Another way of thinking of the different ingredients of a story is
that it needs: (i) A Challenge, (ii) A Response/Reaction, and (iii) A Result.
Essentially, something should happen that changes the circumstances of at least
one character in the story and it should be clear how this has affected / will affect them. I suppose I’m a traditionalist at heart, and I tend to prefer stories where there’s a definite change from one
state of affairs to another. Often I read pieces that are
essentially just setting up a (sometimes) clever twist ending, often relying on a 'revelation' that - if known at the beginning - would make the story utterly banal and tedious (e.g. the dreaded "The Narrator was a Cat All Along!" ending). At the other end of the scale are those where
the whole thing is basically a character sketch, full of quirky detail but lacking in narrative drive. Make sure something happens and
you’ll keep your reader (well, this one at least) happy!
This is just a very brief overview, and I’ll be coming back
to look at those story elements in more detail later. For now, I hope that this
has shed a little light on the subject for those new to the concept, whilst if
you already write flash and think I’m way off the mark with these suggestions
then I’d love to hear from you.
Happy flashing!