What Is Flash Fiction?

This is usually the first question my students and I tackle when I'm teaching a course in flash fiction. I'm ambivalent about answering it because I never feel it's helpful to get too hung up on definitions or try to put creative work into boxes. But people do wonder: What is a short-short? What is flash fiction? What is a prose poem? What is the difference between all of them? What do magazines and reviews mean when they say they publish any one of these?

Here are the best answers I can give:

"Flash fiction" and "short-short story" are used pretty much interchangeably. They refer to short stories that are extremely short. People define how short they actually are differently. Some anthologies, like the Sudden Fiction ones, are pretty loose and will publish stories that are up to five or six pages. I have to say that even though I don't, as I said, like to sort creative work into boxes, I don't think stories like that quite qualify as short-shorts -- in my opinion, they're just relatively brief short stories. To my mind, flash fiction (that is, short-shorts) are anywhere from a few lines to, say, three pages, maybe four. Kafka wrote a lot of these -- if you look at his collected works, you'll see that The Metamorphosis and The Trial are in fact some of the longest things he ever wrote. If you're into flash fiction, you'll love some of this other stuff.

And of course, when you're writing things that short, there are other qualities the stories will often have: a compactness; a lean, streamlined focus. (But not always!)

Prose poems are usually defined either as a short-short that has the richness of language and some of the techniques (internal rhythm and rhyme, allegory and metaphor, etc.) typical of poetry; or sometimes more simply as a poem without the line breaks. That is, the poem is just written like normal prose on the page.

But again, these definitions definitely overlap. For example, my own Halloween-vegetable-men inspired stuff posted earlier -- what the heck is that? Well, I was trying for a richness of language, anyway, and some of them started out as poems, but they seem like stories a bit, so are they prose poems or flash fiction or what? Who knows? Who cares?

Well! I hope that's of interest to y'all. And incidentally, if you've read the excerpt I had here from my novel Mercutio (which is definitely not flash fiction), I put a new excerpt up on that page, if you'd like to see it. Same link, over there at the right.