FlashFiction.Net

For the past several days—here, here, and here—various writers have explored the question, "What is flash fiction?" Most definitions focus on the writing (either the process or the product), but few focus their attentions on the writer.

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More than anything, flash fiction is a way of thinking about fiction. For me, flash fiction derives out of my boredom with that drawn out (act & fail, act & fail, act & fail, ad epiphanitum) middle. It's a reaction to my impatience with waiting. It's part of my ADD, the ability to focus intensely on a project and then move on, one after another. It's about my love of tiny things, the need for each word to fit. It's about the constant anxiety I feel, the need to relieve it by a ritual that can be enacted daily. It's about wanting to set myself against constraints.

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Flash will always be about a word count (usually under 1000 words), but that doesn't quite answer the question, because not everything written under 1000 word would be considered flash fiction. Of course, its tininess defines it, but again, I think it's the mindset of the writer, when faced with the challenge of tininess, that makes fiction flash. Below are nine (9) tiny things that answer "What is flash fiction?" from the perspective, not of the piece itself, but of its author.

1. The love of implication. Maybe you read Encyclopedia Brown as a kid and since then you've viewed the world and its details as clues to be scrutinized and read. You prefer writing with clues rather than facts.
   


2. The love of the One. The Talking Heads asked, "Say something once, why say it again?" You rarely use a string of modifiers, instead choosing the single strong one. You rarely explain the images, letting them stand on their own. There's a Zen-like focus on the world as it is. You are singularly focused. Even if you write word after word in sentence after sentence, each word brings us something fresh, unrepeated.
   


3. The love of narrative compression. There's some part of narrative that you feel the world would be better off without. Maybe it's the exposition at the opening, or exposition altogether. Maybe it's the past; maybe it's the series of actions in the middle. Maybe it's the expectation of an ending that has to be earned through the challenge of obstacle after obstacle. Maybe it's transformation. Maybe it's the cause and effect of plot. Something might be better off disappearing or at least being shrunk until it fits.
   


4. The love of before & after. You prefer the moment before the thing that happens, or maybe it's the aftermath that attracts your attention. You find interest where others find nothingness, significance where others have already moved on. You are the one who stops to peer at things while everyone calls to you, "Come on, come on!"
   


5. An intolerance of the anxiety created by uncertainty. Uncertainty creates anxiety and anxiety creates the need for rituals to alleviate it. Your ritual is writing something that promises to end in a matter of moments. Even then, there's a charged urgency to your writing; even then, you can't wait until it's over. So you can begin again.
   


6. The unfulfilled desires of a poet. You want from your writing all the things that poetry promised you, if only you could've grasped the line break.
   


7. Postmodern sensibilities. The world isn't fallen because Eve ate an apple; it's fallen because we believe Eve ate an apple. The world is what your readers will make of it. You've given them directions and signs of what it might be, but even then, it's out of your hands.
   


8. A hatred of waste.  So much of what readers encounter in a novel is forgotten; it's as if the words exist to be remembered only as echoes from page to page, chapters to chapters. Maybe waste is the wrong word here. Maybe it's about devouring things in that single bite.
   


9. Super coolness. While others have to say they write novels or poems or short stories, you get say you write quick, sudden, flash fiction. You are the master of the short short. How cool is that?
   

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What is flash fiction? It derives out of the mindset of a writer who has set out to write it, for the reasons listed, for the reasons beyond.

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