Comic world: Infant Footwear

Thursday, 12 July 2012

Infant Footwear

The Hemingway story is an extreme example of one of my favorite types of writing -- flash fiction. Flash, also known as micro, sudden, short-short, postcard, minute, quick, furious, and skinny, is a type of story that has a limited number of words (definitely under 1,000, but in many cases, under 500). Typically, it has a traditional beginning-middle-end story arc, though of course it happens in an ultra-condensed form. In my experience as someone who very rarely went beyond 500 words with pieces of fiction, I found that I'd often run into people (usually other writers) with the opinion that short-short fiction is okay, but it's not the real thing, and I think that is an unfair way of looking at flash. Though I definitely make no claims of genius, I absolutely believe that when done by a master, it's an incredibly fast read that lingers indefinitely. Like quick-moving shadows thrown on a late-night wall by cars passing on the street outside, it often takes a lot of thinking to understand what you think you saw, and with each analysis, its shape shifts and you find something different. Take the story "Little Things" by Raymond Carver , which, at 498 words, is a brilliant example of flash fiction.