JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #86
February 17, 2022
Recently we’ve been discussing flash fiction and how to write it. There seem to be a lot of write-ups on the web about flash fiction that include point-by-point guides for writing or assessing flash fiction based on idiosyncratic ideas of what flash fiction should be. It might be useful to remind ourselves why these kinds of guides, though well-intentioned, can be misleading.
Defining flash fiction, like defining any kind of genre category, is always going to be a fraught matter. This is related to a philosophical problem with millennia of debate: what is the nature of the essence of a thing. I’m not sure anyone has improved on Wittgenstein’s answer, which pretty much dispenses with the assumption that a category (he interrogated the concept of a "game") has any kind of intrinsic essence, instead pointing out that the category is determined by our use of it, not any kind of connection between object and concept. Flash fiction as a category is really only a kind of short fiction, and people draw the line of "short" in many different places. There’s also "micro-fiction," "twitter fiction," "short-short stories," "sudden fiction," and many other labels people use for stories told in a constrained space. None of these can be rigorously defined. Even "story" and "fiction" are fuzzy categories that we apply to wildly different examples.
If I were forced to outline some kind of description of flash fiction, I would probably limit my comments to its length. Flash fiction is shorter than a short story. In general, a short story runs to about ten thousand words, give or take a few words depending on who you ask. Flash fiction should therefore be on the lower end of the short story. I’ve seen it defined as two thousand words or less, but also as seven hundred and fifty or five hundred. The exact number doesn’t matter. It just needs to be short, and really, the story itself should dictate its own length, not an arbitrary category definition.
What’s more important than the "flash" portion of the category is the "fiction": to be flash fiction, it should be something that is like a story. I don’t want to insist that it be a story, because many pieces of writing can fit into the category of "fiction," like vignettes, character sketches, certain kinds of ruminations (not this one), and many other things, without being a story. I prefer to define a story as a piece of writing that depicts a character and a plot (with caveats for what that means), and because depicting such things in all their fictively interesting potential requires space, then anything that works in the domain of story in a small space must focus on a smaller number of fictive effects. Maybe there’s more concentration on character than plot, more attention to setting than characterization, more depiction of difficult decisions than their consequences--whatever the focus is, other things that might be depicted in a larger version of the fiction must be left out in flash fiction so that the experience of reading it is much more focused and precise.
In general, a novel has more room for plot than a short story, though short stories certainly have space for some plot. Short stories are simply more concentrated on specific effects. Flash fiction, then, continues to narrow the focus. Flash fiction is hyper-focused on a singular effect, without much movement, since movement requires space, which would push the fiction beyond flash into short story. That would be my definition of flash fiction, and I don’t think it offers any kind of real guidance for how you should write it except to apply the same processes of fiction-writing as you would for a novel, novella, novelette, or short story.
This Rumination was just over six hundred words and much too long.