Monday
12Jun
Some Ideas about Flash and Micro Fiction
Monday, June 12, 2006 at 03:23PM Craig Snyder, one of the editors of rumble, has created an excellent resource for micro fiction and for web-based fiction in general called the Micro Fiction Mini Site. I've been enamored with flash and micro fiction for some time now, both with my Dancing On Fly Ash project and in my own writing. I think Snyder's site does a great job providing both a historical perspective of fiction on the web and an intellectual basis for the future of using non-traditional techniques such as hypertext and CSS to manipulate text beyond the traditional reading experience. You can read his introduction here.
Thinking about Snyder's assertions and projections, it occurred to me that I've been writing flash and micro fiction for years now, almost as long as I've been seriously writing anything. Still, it wasn't until recently that I really started exploring the aesthetics or philosophical underpinning of the forms. What I'd like to do here is to make an attempt at figuring out what it is I like about these forms as well as the how and why of my writing them.
The micro fiction--for argument's sake, let's say anything 500 words or less--seems to me to grow in potential as it moves away from the more traditional forms of fiction. The novel, novella, and short story have distinct effects and characteristics that differentiate each other, and for the most part it is easy to tell one from the other. A short novel is distinct from a novella, even when they're the same length, and a fifteen thousand word short story is clearly not a novella even though it's nearly triple or quadruple the length of most short stories.
If we accept this premise, then why does it seem like so much of flash and micro-fiction still aspires to be nothing more than a small short story? I'd like to propose that these forms are as different from their bigger brothers as the short story and the novel are from each other. Sure, micro fiction and novels are both written using similar tools. Still, it's the difference between using a saw, hammer, and nails to make a bench when you might have built a house instead. One isn't better or worse, just different.
Of course, this isn't to say that there isn't a place for traditional narratives that skew shorter and shorter to fit the nature of the web or just the demands of an individual story. Some flash fiction is always going to be nothing more than very short stories, and I think that's just fine too. All I'm suggesting is that it may be possible that as stories grow shorter and shorter they become less like the stories we're used to and more like something new and exciting. These shortest of forms are still fairly new (at least in their widespread practice), and I think their future is most likely an exciting one. I'm looking forward to continuing my own writing in this area and also to seeing what others come up with. Once we recognize the basic qualities of our form and organize them into some loose sense of aesthetics and purpose, I believe it will become easier to move forward with our work, leading to flash and micro fiction becoming a completely distinct form with its own definite qualities and characteristics. It's an exciting genre to be working in, one that's full of innovative writers and provocative stories, a statement that will only become more true with the passage of time.
View Printer Friendly Version
Email Article to Friend
Reader Comments (1)
I just discovered this post of yours through roundabout links. I am so glad that you read and write flash fiction. Whenever you have time, I'd love for you to pay a visit to my site http://rjaneflashfiction.blogspot.com because it is devoted to flash fiction (although the most recent post is more of a flash essay/reading response). Thank you so much for the links here and the Craig Snyder and Dancing on Fly Ash info. I feel I've found a like mind! What a relief!