Discussion → Very Short Fiction
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The short story form has lately been witness to, or the occasion for, something like experimentation. Though writers are still writing good long stories, as well as stories of medium length, there has been a surge in the number of published stories (especially online) that push the boundaries of what initially was referred to as "flash fiction." Is this simply a trend, or is it more complicated than that? To what degree are the writers of these stories making conscious choices about form?
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Hi Edward,
Thanks for creating this group and thanks for matchbook for accepting my work.
Best,
Dan
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Hi Edward, these questions interest me for a number of reasons. My writing tends to be very short, often between 300 - 800 words (sometimes much shorter). At this point, it seems like "that's the way I write". Sometimes, editors have suggested adding to my stories...and I've gone back to do so. Once or twice that has made 500 word stories into 1000 word stories. There are times I think I'm being "lazy", not really fleshing stories out before moving onto something else. I don't know. During edits, I tend to cut nearly everything out. So a 1500-word piece ends up being 750, etc. When I examine my older writing, the longer pieces are full of sub-plots (that's "good" sometimes) but also extraneous actions, dialogue, etc.
I'm not sure if it's a trend. That is something I hear a lot (brought up a few times at a flash fiction panel I was on in April in DC). I do find myself reading almost exclusively short stories...and not getting into novels like I used to. Partly that's b/c my mortgage is a killer and most books I buy are for the kids. So, I read and read stories on the internet. Thanks for asking about this. Quite curious what others think. David
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This is a good question.
There are many writers who are making conscious decisions about the short form, who are trying to push the boundaries of what we think of as narrative, who are trying to tell complex stories in very contained spaces, who are challenging reader expectations about language and meaning. The short short form no longer encompasses only flash fiction and while I am skeptical, I am very intrigued by hint fiction, nano fiction and micro fiction. I like to see how writers navigate the constraints of, say, writing a story in 140 characters.
At the same time, there are writers who simply find it easier to knock off several very short stories and add credits to their CV. I certainly don't judge this approach. That isn't my place, but I do think its important to acknowledge that this is happening. There is no point in pretending everyone is engaging with the short short form in a deliberate, critical and conscious manner. Does that even need to happen? Do we need to approach writing critically? I don't know.
I also think it is difficult to really address a question like this without some kind of definition of a story. There are lots of different ideas out there about what makes a story.
Still, it is not at all hard to tell the difference between the two kinds of writers I'm talking about and that says something too.
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welcome matchbook!
my quick take: i think there's only one conscious choice for many writers -- the choice to write vsf at all. i make the choice because I love the necessity of exploring and 'experimenting' -- in the sense that you use that word, Edward -- with the emerging form.
It's interesting for me to think back to when I made the choice the other way, when I didn't write vsf. I didn't write it even though I knew I had an affinity for it and that I might be 'good' at it.... Why? Probably because most of the people whose books I was reading didn't write it..... I'll say this: I enjoy writing more now. Even my longer stuff somehow....
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I feel like writing very short "pieces" (I know it's kind of a stupid word, but I'll get to that in a minute) for me grew organically. I was (am) a poet before I became a fiction writer. In fact, while my PhD is in creative writing for fiction, I had taken perhaps a single fiction writing workshop before I began that degree program. Otherwise, I couldn't count how many poetry workshops I'd taken.
The generic distinctions we make between very short, micro, flash, or whatever kind of fiction you want to call it, and, say, the prose poem (or, at least the narrative prose poem) are arbitrary. So when I started writing short "pieces," I couldn't definitively say what genre of writing I was trying to complete. I just had a voice, a character, and specific details, a dramatic situation. In some cases, what I wrote felt more defined by the dramatic situation (or plot), and others held together by the weight of their details, or the strength of the language.
But I always pay a lot of attention to language, whether it's a short thing or long, and I think it's necessary to make any kind of writing interesting. While Hemingway's super short, six-word story (you know, the "For sale: baby shoes; never worn") hints at the sadness for the characters just on the periphery of the situation, the language is fairly mundane. It's not even a complete sentence. I'm not saying I would or could do better, but here's a story that hangs almost entirely on plot. It's interesting (a la Henry James), but it doesn't make my tongue dance, and that's something I'm always looking for in any literature.
I know that if you are a "minimalist" you're not trying to get too fancy language-wise. And if you subscribe to Gardner, you wouldn't want language to draw too much attention to itself, and so readers step away from the "fictive dream," but even the best minimalists paid careful attention at the language level. Chekhov wrote that if you want to describe the moonlight, show it glimmering in a puddle, or reflected from a shard of glass.
Anyway, to get to the trendiness of the very short, David points to the fact that many writers and readers get their lit from the internet, a medium that seems perfect for the form. I don't want to read very long fiction on a computer screen. In fact this fucking post is too long.
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More and more, I am interested in the part of the story called the title and having the title do more and more if not most, if not all of the work. The title is the short, short story's short short story. The experiment of brevity in the form is akin to Cage's in music--4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. How short is short? What is the calculus of the approach to this absolute zero? A story so short it cannot even muster one word only its title.
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Jurgen, how do 'favorite' Michael's comment?
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I agree that the overlap (or even confusion) between what is flash fiction and what is prose poetry is significant. It is perhaps even part of the genesis of the current flash 'fashion'. Kim Chinquee chose to subtitle "Oh Baby" "Flash Fictions and Prose Poems", but we didn't make any kind of distinction or separation of contents into the two categories: readers have to do that, if they care. A very short story can be maximal in language and commentary; a novel can be minimal. Should 'flash fiction' indicate not merely a length but an approach? To me, it should; to others, no.
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Choosing a title scares me (anything scares me) if i place TOO much importance on it - so, I try not to see it as the most important aspect, rather an organic (hopefully) part of a whole in which everything matters. I don't want to...er...develop a title phobia. Hmmm. Still, i know this is true, what MM said.
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I am reminded of James Wright's long titles to some of his '60s poems. It can be great fun.
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hmmm. this is a conversation ive had so many times in the past i think to restate what ive said before is just redundant. but i will anyway...
i agree with roxane that writers crank out short fictions to pad their cv because they are lazy, insincere, or just not that good, but i disagree that it happens more in flash than in other genres. there arent people cranking out shitty poems? shitty short stories? just as frequently? really?
i agree with jamie that labeling writing as flash or hint or nano is arbitrary and boring. i only do on the dogzplot flash site so people who are unfamiliar with the site know exacty what they are getting. i use the term to define the guidelines, not the individual stories.
i write lots of things of all different lengths. when i have an idea or a line in my head i dont sit down and say, oh, im gonna write a short story or im gonna write a novel or im gonna write a poem or a flash fiction, but i think there are people who do that and that bothers me.
just crank out good words and whatever's gonna happen let it happen naturally. defining your writing by genre before you start writing is limiting and unproductive. it stifles creativity and exploration.
thats all i got to say about that (say it like forrest gump), you know you wanna.
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Barry, I absolutely agree that shoddy writing happens across all genres. I only referenced flash here because the question was about short short forms.
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"just crank out good words and whatever's gonna happen let it happen naturally. defining your writing by genre before you start writing is limiting and unproductive. it stifles creativity and exploration."
i don't mean to differ w/ this, but i want to think out loud about it....
my take: if you consider 2 sort of unrealistic extremes--A) somebody feels like writing and ends up writing 200 'good words'; B) somebody sits down and starts writing with nothing but the dry intention of writing what they might consider to be a 'microfiction'--writer A's stuff is going to be better. But unless writer A draws on interiorized notions of form, neither result going to be much more than an exercise. b4 editing/rewriting, anyway....
like say, that's unrealistic, tho..... probably A does draw on interiorized notions of form, especially when working the sentences, playing his own reader.... and probably B hears music at some point, and the music determines what the song will be.....
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Re: Michael Martone and titles. You can look this up. Way back in the mid 1970's perhaps poet Aram Saroyan wrote the following poem:
lighght
He was 22 at the time, and he won $750 for it from the NEA. Well of course the folks holding the purse strings went nuts. That was a poem? (You can almost imagine the slobber spraying out beside the cigar.) I think it was George Plimpton who selected it for the award.
Anyway, this was way before "Piss Christ."
Short can be awfully good. Just look at some of the incredibly talented people who are doing commercials that last only 15 seconds and tell a whole story.
I love some of the very clever things that Michael and others are doing with really short forms, and am to some degree pretty jealous, actually. But I think Roxane has nailed it with her insistence on (or request for) a definition of a story. Or "story."
Saroyan's poem was a poem because that's what he called it. Or perhaps that's what it insisted it was.
So what is a story? Maybe it's like porn—I know it when I see it.
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Interesting discussion. For my part, I have written almost nothing which isn't "short short" or flash fiction for the past two years, and now am moving even shorter, towards poetry, because for me the brevity frees me. I feel that I don't have to adhere to any traditional structures, don't have to explain anything, my writing can be far more surreal.
I don't edit my flash, they come out that length, for me - as Coop says, the process and the approach is as "flash" as the end product, mostly in one sitting, and it's an incredible adrenalin rush to do that. I can seem to get into a zone when i set out to write a flash that I haven't been able to do with longer pieces.
However, it is addictive, and I do miss the process of writing longer ( for me 800 words and up) the beginning of something that I don't finish, something I have to wait to see how it's going to progress, that I work on over weeks and months. I have recently written two 1500 word stories, and I can see how my flash training is leading me to write these pieces differently now, so if possible I'd like to bring the flash approach into longer work.
But a story has its proper length, I personally would find it very hard to expand an existing flash into a short story, just as it would probably be difficult for a poet to transform a poem into a play, say. Different forms, different purposes, different results.
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I love the idea of writing incredibly dense, pithy prose — almost impossibly so — Borges condensed. I know I've been working in my critical/theoretical writing on extreme brevity: state the idea, however insane and esoteric, and get out. Rather than elaborate or explicate, let the reader read it again and again. (Or not.)
In this sense, a "flash" become a "savor," a "linger," and a "repeat."
I suppose what I'm pointing to is the distinction between length and speed. Something might be quite long but fly; another, quite short but insist, slowly. Does flash speak only to brevity? Or to swiftness, as well?
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This question illuminates, I think, the inadequacy of labels that attempt to describe too literally the kinds of writings to which they are assigned. Whereas “novel,” for instance, means new (and therefore is not referential enough to elicit preconceptions in a reader’s or a writer’s mind), “flash” seems to want to describe (and thus pin down) a process that requires freedom from preconceptions in order to thrive.
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nicely put, E. that's my problem w/ the term exactly.
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I'm of the mind that a story should be as long as it needs to be, at least in an initial draft. Then when you edit and revise, well, if you can take out a sentence or paragraph (or even scene) and the story doesn't lose anything, obviously it doesn't need to be there in the first place so pitch it. There are times where I've taken a story of, say, 1,500 words and managed to cut out 500. Does that mean it's no longer a "short story" and now a "flash fiction"? Like everyone else, I tend to find the labels rather silly. But the very very very short forms like microfiction and nanofiction and hint fiction -- they seem to be an exercise in brevity more than anything else. And like Michael said, when you get to that very short of length, the title becomes extremely important.
Group Description
We're an online literary journal that publishes works of short, indeterminate prose and accompanying criticism. We feature one author every posting period (every two weeks). Every so often a question related to the form and function of fiction will be posted here for discussion.
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