Flash fiction
As flash fiction , even Sudden Fiction or Fast Fiction , still a very young is a literary genre called that originated in Anglo-American short stories has. The name Flash Fiction comes from the collection of works of the same name by the authors James Thomas, Denise Thomas and Tom Hazuka , which was published in 1992.
Mark
The special feature of Flash Fiction is its brevity. Although there is no general word limit, short stories are usually referred to as flash fiction if they do not exceed 1,000 to 2,000 words in length. The majority of Flash fiction stories have 250 to 1,000 words. In contrast, traditional short stories contain an average of 2,000 to 20,000 words.
Despite this relative brevity, Flash fiction stories contain the elements of the classic short story : protagonist, conflict, obstacle and complication as well as the solution. However, due to the limited number of words, Flash Fiction authors are forced to only highlight some of these elements and only hint at them in the course of the plot. This principle was taken to the extreme by Ernest Hemingway's six-word flash .
Literary roots and development
The roots of Flash Fiction go back to the fables of Aesop, first major fame gained "very short short stories" by Anton Chekhov , O. Henry , Franz Kafka , HP Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury . The new genre experienced a real boom through the Internet, but also through the publication of many Flash fiction stories in literary magazines and daily newspapers. In addition, starting with the first work in 1992, numerous collections of works and writing instructions on the subject of Flash Fiction were published.
Further developments
The principle of Flash Fiction found numerous followers. Many authors tried to take the flash fiction principle to extremes and to depict complete storylines in ever shorter texts. These works are commonly referred to as nanofiction or microfiction . In this context, Hemingway's six-word flash became well known :
" For sale: baby shoes, never worn . "
There are also isolated flash fiction approaches in which the technical limitation of SMS or Twitter messages is used as a framework for an entire story. One of the first literature projects in which several German-speaking authors explored the narrative potential of 160 SMS characters was entitled “SMServices-Text on Demand”. In Germany, you can read about this on Florian Meimberg's Twitter account @tiny_tales . Another term that turns the factual limitation into a literary framework is Postcard Stories .
See also
literature
- Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories. Edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas. Layton, Utah: Gibbes M. Smith, Inc., 1986.
- Sudden Fiction (Continued): 60 New Short-Short Stories. Edited by Robert Shapard, James Thomas, 1996.
- Sudden Fiction International: 60 Short-Short Stories. Edited by James Thomas and Robert Shapard. New York-London: WW Norton & Company , 1989.
- Fast Fiction: Creating Fiction in Five Minutes. Roberta Allen, Cincinnati: Story Press, 1997.
- Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories. Edited by James Thomas, Denise Thomas, & Tom Hazuka. New York-London: WW Norton & Company, 1992.
- Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories. Edited by James Thomas and Robert Shapard; New York-London, WWNorton & Company, 2006.