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What
is Flash Fiction? Mark Twain apparently said that if he had had more time, he would have written a shorter story... With only several thousand words in which to tell their stories, short fiction is an art form in which every word counts. There is little room for anything which doesn't serve the story. A great short story is like a slap in the face, brief enough to devour in one sitting, leaving the reader gasping at what can be done in just a few pages. Flash fiction refines this even further. Also known as short shorts, sudden fiction, micro fiction, postcard fiction, prose poems, these terms refer to stories which are less than 1000 words long, and often much much shorter. Every word, every comma, every line break is crucial in these tiny fictions. While their extreme brevity allows for a looser definition of the beginning-middle-end story structure, these are not "fragments", they are complete unto themselves. This isn't something new, something invented by the "Internet generation" to fit onto a tiny cellphone screen or to suit increasingly hectic lifestyles. Jorge Luis Borges, Margaret Atwood and Raymond Carver are just some of the "big names" whose flash fiction is widely available. Sometimes resembling poetry in the way their language twists and turns, flash fiction is increasing in popularity and can be found in literary magazines online and in print across the world, in many languages. In China, these tiny fictions are called "smoke-long" because they can be read in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette! Half the stories in The White Road and Other Stories fall under the definition of flash fiction. Read two examples: Plaits and I am A Camera. Tania is currently working on a collection of flash fiction. More on flash fiction: Mslexia's article on The Joy of Flash Fiction, Writing-World's article Flash What?, Writing Flash Fiction on The Fiction Factor Places to read great flash fiction:
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