At OryCon 31, I attended a panel on "flash fiction." The panelists were writers and publishers of flash fiction. I didn't know what to expect. I supposed flash fiction might be fiction that's produced rapidly -- in a flash. But it turns out flash fiction refers to stories of extreme brevity -- typically under 1,000 words, although there is no widely accepted length limit. There are lots of markets for flash fiction now -- some paying, most not. A few are print publications, but most are on the internet. Some actually offer their readers a daily e-mail containing a complete flash story.
Of course short-short fiction has been around as since Aesop's Fables, but it seems the form has taken on new life (fits right in with our busy lifestyles and short attention spans). People are even doing Twitter fiction now, which is limited to 140 characters (that's characters, not words!). Someone commented that short fiction in general (not just flash) is currently undergoing a sort of resurgence. I heard a lot about flash and short fiction in general at the convention. Lou Anders (editor guest of honor) said that the cutting edge belongs to the short form. He foresees something like the iTunes model for short fiction.
Anyway I found the idea of flash fiction exciting, as I've been doing my own form of it for some time. Every day I try to turn out a complete piece -- usually fiction -- usually not presentable, trash-ready. My form of flash fiction is indeed produced in a flash. It's a practice, just something to keep my juices flowing, but once in a while I turn out something that, after some polishing, might be acceptable for a flash-fiction market. So I was rapt; I wrote down a dozen or more markets mentioned during the panel. I haven't checked them all out yet.
On to the next OryCon post>>>
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Fredric Brown (1906-1972) wrote many short-short stories, as they were called back then. The shortest was this one:
The last man on Earth sat alone in a room.
There was a knock on the door. . .
Here's another:
The End
Professor Jones had been working on time theory for many years.
"And I have found the key equation," he told his daughter one day. "Time is a field. This machine I have made can manipulate, even reverse, that field."
Pushing a button as he spoke, he said, "This should make time run backward backward run time make should this," said he, spoke he as button a pushing.
"Field that, reverse even, manipulate can amde have I machine this. Field is a time." Day one daughter his told he, "Equation key the found have I and."
"Years many for theory time on working been had Jones Professor."
Written by Fredric Brown, 1961
One more:
Imagine
Imagine ghosts, gods and devils.
Imagine hells and heavens, cities floating in the sky and cities sunken in the sea
Unicorns and centaurs. Witches, warlocks, jinns and banshees.
Angels and harpies. Charms and incantations. Elementals, farmiliars, demons.
Easy to imagine all of those things: mankind has been imagining them for thousands of years.
Imagine spaceships and the future.
Easy to imagine; the future is really coming and there'll be spaceships in it.
Is there then anything that's really hard to imagine?
Of course there is.
Imagine a piece of matter and yourself inside it, yourself, aware, thinking and therefore knowing you exist, able to move that piece of matter that you're in," to make it sleep or wake, make love or walk uphill.
Imagine a universe-infinite or not, as you wish to picture it- with a billion, billion, billion suns in it.
Imagine a blob of mud whirling madly around one of those suns.
Imagine yourself standing on that blob of mud, whirling with it, whirling through time and space to an unknown destination.
Imagine!
Written by Fredric Brown, 1955
Carl Sandburg wrote what he called a Novel in four lines. It went like this:
Papa loved Mama.
Mama loved men.
Mama's in the graveyard.
Papa's in the pen.
Brevity is indeed the soul of wit.
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