Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Welcome to the Wonderful World of Flash Fiction!

Need something really (and I mean really) quick to read while standing in line? May I suggest reading flash fiction, which is defined by Wikipedia as:
A style of fictional literature or fiction of extreme brevity. There is no widely accepted definition of the length of the category. Some self-described markets for flash fiction impose caps as low as three hundred words, while others consider stories as long as a thousand words to be flash fiction.
Flash fiction is also known by several other names, which Wikipedia says:
include sudden fiction, microfiction, micro-story, short short, postcard fiction and short short story, though distinctions are sometimes drawn between some of these terms; for example, sometimes one-thousand words is considered the cut-off between "flash fiction" and the slightly longer short story "sudden fiction".

To read examples of flash fiction, check out the following story, Micr-O Fiction: 8 Provocative Writers Tell Us a Story in 300 Words or Less, from O Magazine! I enjoyed the eight stories provided and agree with the O Magazine writers that flash fiction is "short (and we mean short), intense (imagine a novel crossed with a haiku), and mesmerizing (whether they're illuminating a single moment or a whole life)."

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