Discussion → Debatable Lengths
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I've seen limits on micro-fiction set for 100, 200, 400 and 500. Much of what is referred to as flash is at the lower word counts. Flash can be up to 2000, but these days it rarely seems to break the 1000-1200 mark. I think the definitions are changing, shortening in part because of the Internet and people's attention spans. What do other people think?
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I adhere to "1,000" as the limit for flash. I wrote quite a few 1,000-or-so-word stories before "flash" was in common use. I really enjoyed that metier. Certain stories just came out that way, 3-4 pp. double-spaced. There was pressure against writing so briefly, some of it well-motivated, also not many venues for it (I mean before the Internet). Sudden fiction was another name for it then, and the anthology of Sudden fiction I have on my shelf, Sudden Fiction International, is a collection of quite short stories written by internationally known authors who typically wrote novels. In my mind, there is a distinction between novelists and short story writers, though so many of them go between or did go between. Advent of the Internet has made flash more possible because it is less regulated than traditional publishing, who/that/which may have felt no commercial demand for flash as a product and who may have felt an ethic inherent in story length as well, an ethical imperative to write longer stories, complexity of stories associated with the novel. And few exceptions-meant: Donald Barthelme, Flannery O'Connor, Grace Paley, Lorrie Moore, Lydia Davis, Amy Hempel, naming here only Americans, so also Alice Munro, Jorge Luis Borges, Anton Chekhov. Listing leads to leaving out names.
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I am of the view that very short stories, 25-500 words are radical, but one 60s-era (born in '65?) poet-ranter I know finds nothing radical in flash. Radical meaning at the root? Radical as in radically short, as in haircut? Phrase: "Had me by the short ones" cannot mean now what it did when I first heard it. This is headed off in hair direction. I have a lot of hair material. A flash opera called Hair could be my gesture.
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I think length is not so much the point as that a big story is contained in few words, like the galaxy in a marble hung from a cat's collar in Men in Black. My own microfiction ranges from under 100 to 250. My flash fiction is usually 650 and up, but under 1000. I think there is a qualitative difference in the work in the different lengths that's hard to define, but I think the quote I cite by Joseph Young does a good job.
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1000 or less seems acceptable. i'm currently in the short distance world, 500-700.
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Under 1000 is generally considered flash. But under 500 starts to wander into microfiction land, definitely by 250 and under its solidly microfiction, in my opinion. I think micro is to flash fiction as prose poetry is to poetry. It's different. Prose poetry and micro meld.
Group Description
ALL MICROFICTION ALL THE TIME.
Here's a place to post both published and unpublished Microfiction and a place to discuss and debate the special aesthetics of the genre.
Some sources claim word count under 100, others under 200, others under 400 and still others under 500. Your guess is as good as mine, but 500 is the absolute limit. The shorter the better. Poetry welcome.
Joseph Young in FRIGG, Spring 2009, wrote,
"To be its own genre, microfiction needs to do something that other forms won’t. It needs to use language, description, dialogue, character to tell a story that can’t be told any other way. It’s not just compression, and it’s not just leaving things out, background info on characters or such. Microfiction needs to carve out whole worlds in a space small enough to fit the eye. You look, just once, and there the whole story is, on the page...
"If fiction (e.g., narrative) is time, then microfiction is microtime. But let me caveat. A microfiction can describe the entire life of a character. It can illustrate birth, marriage, death, 80 years of experience. But the amount from that 80 years that actually occurs in microfiction, in microtime, is nearly nothing, a tenth of a second."
Me? I think of microfiction as the miniature galaxy inside the marble hung from the cat's collar in Men in Black.
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