Flash Fiction

As a genre, it can be somewhat difficult to differentiate flash fiction from the short story. In general, flash fiction is characterized by greater brevity. Moreover, from a broader perspective, it can be suggested that flash fiction has by and large been an Internet phenomenon: the idea would that anyone can write flash fiction, insofar as anyone can write half a page. The extent to which flash fiction should be treated as a full-fledged genre is thus a little unclear. 

Introduction 

You could probably write a piece of flash fiction right now, if you wanted. So, what actually is flash fiction?  Flash fiction is a term used to describe a story of very short length. The exact parameters for defining flash fiction tend to vary.

In general, though, the boundaries of length can be set at anywhere from below 1 double-spaced page to up to 3 double-spaced pages.

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Examples of flash fiction

Here are some examples of the term flash fiction being used within sentences. 

• "Some of the stories of Franz Kafka have been retroactively classified as flash fiction, even though the term did not even exist back during the time that he was actually producing his own literary works." 
• "The reader was shocked to realize that despite its extreme brevity, the flash fiction piece actually did contain all the classical elements of fiction, including character, setting, and plot development." 
• "It is said that the writer Ernest Hemingway won a bet against other writers at a bar by writing a six-word piece of flash fiction on a napkin." 

In case you are still a little confused about the meaning of the term flash fiction, here are a couple rules you can follow to make sure you are using it correctly. 

1. The concept of flash fiction is not rigorously defined. In general, it refers to a very short story that has, moreover, been constructed with brevity consciously in mind as an aesthetic value. Flash fiction thus refers not just to the length of the work but also implicitly to the intention of the author who wrote the given piece. 
2. Flash fiction is a relatively recent concept. It is thus somewhat unclear whether it is fully appropriate to classify older works of literature as flash fiction. It has admittedly become somewhat common to do so; however, this can only be done by dropping some of the specific cultural connotations associated with the term flash fiction. 

The internet's impact on the genre

To a significant extent, the genre (read more about different types of genres) of flash fiction has seen an enormous expansion with the advent of the Internet. This is because with the Internet, anyone at all is able to write whatever he or she would like and then work toward making that writing available to a broader public. People could, of course, write within any genre. But the flash fiction genre has likely become especially popular due to the obvious perception that it is "easy" to write a story that can be no longer than 3 double-spaced pages and can even be as short as just one single sentence. 

The Huffington Post highlights examples of Flash Fiction in an article from 2014.

There is perhaps a misunderstanding in this regard as to the nature of flash fiction. As most actual story writers and poets would indicate, brevity of composition does not imply ease of composition; much the opposite, it requires considerable talent to make every single word count and focus a maximum of meaning into a minimum of actual content. This means that properly speaking, flash fiction should be an extremely difficult genre within which to produce high-quality literature. However, the term flash fiction itself seems to connote the democratic openness of the Internet, which makes its status as an actual genre somewhat dubious.