Tag: flash fiction
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Susan Rukeyser: Short Stories Are a Digestible Meal
The short story is a sit-down dinner. It opens with an amuse-bouche to stimulate the salivary glands. Then comes a parade of flavors and textures, each adding a layer of understanding: the bitter crunch of melancholy, velvety arousal, tough and chewy survival, sharp loss. The end will almost certainly be a blend of sour and…
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Simon Kearns: Flash Fiction Is Worth a Thousand Words
The novel is a painting. The short story, a sketch. Flash fiction is a photograph, and, as we know, worth a thousand words. Personally, I prefer a word count between 200 and 500. I like flash fiction that plays with form, that turns the reading into a game. In my own work I often seek…
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Sarah Malone: Short Stories are an Arrival. Flash Fiction is a Journey.
With stories whose endings are visible from the first sentence, or inferable from the length of web browser scrollbars, I don’t release my awareness of real time as I do with narratives long enough to settle into an illusion of merging with them. Instead I become acutely aware of surface tension, the bent boundary between…
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Marcus Speh: Flash Fiction Encourages Reckless, Rickety Reading (and that’s okay)
It is well known that the short story was invented by the Man in the Moon for two important reasons worth reminding ourselves of no matter where we live or what we’re made of: the first is that the Man in the Moon always found it difficult to finish a novel because of the instability…
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Kevin Catalano: Flash Fiction is Like a Flasher
Jayne Anne Phillips, a former writing instructor of mine at Rutgers-Newark, and a fantastic writer of the short form, referred to the “flash” piece as “one-page fiction.” (She made these pieces famous in her impossibly good Black Tickets.) I don’t think she liked the term flash, and I know many others who despise it. I, on…
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Mickey Laurence Cohen: Flash Fiction Is Only for the Moment
I hate short stories. Hate to read them, not a big fan of writing them. I like novels, I like the feeling I’m entering an entirely new world, or creating one. The best novels can build their own vocabulary, even a new language altogether. Short stories are windows. Windows are nice, especially with curtains, and…
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Mike Maggio: Stories Are Rooted In the Oral Tradition
The short story is the crystalline form of the novel; that is, it takes the essence of what makes a novel (character, plot, dramatic development) and condenses it into a form that is whole and pleasing. What the novelist accomplishes in two or three hundred pages, the short storiest, if I can coin that term,…