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A Story in a Flash
Flash fiction is experiencing an unprecedented surge in popularity, especially in North America. Many US literary journals now have regular slots for flash fiction; others that are sprouting up - in print and online - are wholly dedicated to flash fiction. Mainstream publishers are also riding the flash fiction wave: think of book collections such as The World's Shortest Stories, Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories, Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories, and Short Shorts: An Anthology of the Shortest Stories. But perhaps it was Salon.com, the trend-setting New Media newspaper, that clinched the future of flash fiction on the mainstream literary map when, last June, it published a collection called 31 Ejaculations.
At first glance, flash fiction seems suspiciously trite, a literary wheeze, if you will. A story in 500 words or less? If a novel is a marathon, flash fiction is a sprint - but like all great literature, flash stories linger in the mind long after we have read the last word. And yes, not just about anyone can sustain this form of literary sprint without floundering. Questioned about flash fiction, Anton Chekov said: "I can speak briefly on long subjects."
Like Anton Chekov, the fathers of modern flash fiction have set high literary standards. Jorge Luis Borges' flash fiction, particularly in The Book of Imaginary Beings, unleashes unsettling philosophical truths far beyond the weight of the half a page that spans the stories from first to last word. And Franz Kafka's flash stories in Parables and Paradoxes continue to haunt us throughout our lives.
In a sense flash fiction is as old as Aesop's Fables, but only in the past decade has this mode of writing emerged from the erratic solo efforts of its forebearers in book collections to a popular art form in its own right. There are workshops and critique groups that now focus solely on flash fiction. And there are how-to books that whet our appetite by promising to teach us the craft of creating a story out of thin air in five minutes. If only it was that simple!
Flash fiction refers to stories of anything between 50 and 1000 words, more typically about 500 words long. It's not a situation, not a vignette, but a story with an identifiable beginning, middle, and ending. The stories are tight and punchy; every word sweats. The stories can be whimsical, ironic, satirical, sublime, enigmatic - you name it; the stories are often elusive and paradoxical. Flash stories are especially suited for twist endings because in such a short sprint of prose the twist ending is devastating, flipping everything that came before on its head with hurricane force. And flash stories are high on implication; hence the stories often attract attention to their existence, the prose itself and the form, and encourage us to reread them. They rock the base of our perceptions. They jump at us from the page.
Perhaps, as Charles Baxter pointed out, flash stories are "between poetry and fiction, the story and the sketch, prophecy and reminiscence, the personal and the crowd." But perhaps grappling with definitions is useless because, as in defining a novel, there are as many definitions of what flash fiction is as there are writers of flash fiction. The only thing that is sure is that flash fiction straddles all genres, from mainstream to science fiction, from monologues to horror. The only limit: flash stories can't be more than 1,000 words long.
Form is fluid. Some stories, for example, are entirely made up of dialogue without any descriptive tags. Others are in the second-person viewpoint. Some switch viewpoints several times, understandingly difficult to do in half a page. One thing to keep in mind is that, the more unusual and flippant the form, the more important it is to have a distinctive voice or voices to unify the story. But flash stories are a refreshingly versatile form: some writers are experimenting with them as performing art, reading them in poetry cafes, theatres and on the radio.
The sweet short wit of flash stories lends itself to the exploration of a topic from different and paradoxical perspectives. Some contemporary writers are creating tableaus of flash stories to create longer stories or novels. Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities, for example, is made up of a collection of one- or two-page flash stories that are like the pieces of a jigsaw, and only when all the stories are read does the larger picture emerge. The physicist-turned-writer Alan Lightman did the same thing in Einstein's Dreams; what is especially pleasing is that each story stands alone as a philosophical thread, and additionally, the stories assembled together titillate larger concepts. In its 31 Ejaculations, Salon.com employs a similar technique - each story is about sex, and in each the mystic elusiveness and mad absurdity of sex is implied, and that implication is both the unifying theme and the larger picture.
But why the popularity of flash fiction and its emergence from its one-off uses to a sudden art form now? Several reasons have been proposed. The main theory is that it fits our breathless lives, a perfect potion of literature for our fast food culture. (This is the reason I started writing flash stories; I felt that one can go to bed with a book of flash stories without experiencing the daily frustration of having to pick the thread of the story halfway through a chapter or short story). Another theory is that we have grown tired of spending two months to slog through long novels, so flash stories are crisper on our weary minds. Or perhaps flash fiction has come of age thanks to the Internet: readers are put off by long chunks of text on the screen, and these stories can be perfectly packaged online because the whole story fits the dimension of a screen.
Personally I believe that, while all these reasons are valid, they are secondary. Flash fiction unleashes its potency because it mimics our minds - the truth comes to us infrequently and - well - in flashes.
© Victor Paul Borg
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