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.
Infant Footwear
Infant Footwear
Infant Footwear
Infant Footwear
Infant Footwear
Infant Footwear
Infant Footwear
