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The novel is a painting. The short story, a sketch. Flash fiction is a photograph, and, as we know, worth a thousand words.

Personally, I prefer a word count between 200 and 500. I like flash fiction that plays with form, that turns the reading into a game. In my own work I often seek to add further limits to the text, such as in my Fugues, where the three parts, subject, development and recapitulation, serve to introduce, explore and resolve the theme or story.

Writing flash fiction is a perfect compliment to the writing of novels. The liberty of style and content, economy of words, the immediacy of the reader’s reaction, all contribute to the pleasure of producing flash fiction.

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For the past couple of years, I’ve been working on the long form and haven’t written much short fiction. But whenever I feel like I need to step away from the novel I’ve been immersed and possibly bogged down in for months and recharge the imagination, I find that working on short fiction is the cure. Because short stories begin so much in the middle—a past implied, a present explored, a future as possibility, the storytelling is inherently selective. And this allows you to jump into any story at any time and make something of that chosen moment. With any story, short or long, you are forced to ask yourself what moments matter the most? But a short story reduces that selection even further, often to a single moment of discovery, a flash of illumination. Yet, the beauty of the short story relies on the belief that lifetimes can be conveyed in that single moment.

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I remember reading somewhere, about five years ago, that more than half of all Americans between the ages of twenty and forty reported being in a band. The commentariat felt that this boded ill for the future of the music industry, having more participants than audience members. The same thing seems to be happening now with short stories. For every person I’ve met who professes to love reading short stories, I meet ten who claim to write them. Brevity demands precision and skill; it is also catnip to the amateur author. Whereas a novel demands time, patience and a yeomanlike work ethic to complete, a short story can often be finished in a single afternoon. As with poetry – an even more egregious example – it is an art form whose difficulty to master is in inverse proportion to the number of people willing to give it a try. Its diminutiveness is mistaken for simplicity, as if any rube off the turnip truck could construct a microchip.

“[Short stories] are the inevitable future of fiction writing, if fiction writing is to have a future.”

As I sit here, trying to carve out the fifteen minutes necessary to write down these two paragraphs, it occurs to me that my opinion on short stories is beside the point. They are the inevitable future of fiction writing, if fiction writing is to have a future. In my more pessimistic moments, I fear it will be a bleak future indeed; the short story’s perseverance seems predicated on vanity, the co-opted veneer of sophistication that accompanies being a published “writer.” Then I think to myself, “Franz Kafka.” There could always be another. Who knows?

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What I love most about the short story is that you can do things that you can’t in a novel.  Especially the short-short.  Italo Calvino’s “All At One Point,” is one of my favorites.  Who would read a whole novel about the fact that all matter and creation used to exist in a single point?  But a book of linked stories that each takes a scientific fact and builds an imaginative story around it?  Sign me up.

While the story is short it must go to great lengths to make itself important.  It doesn’t have time for the conventions of the novel—there aren’t pages enough to make the reader fall head over heels in love with the characters.  Instead the language, the ideas, the plot of the short story have to dazzle, and quickly.  Urgently.  The short story is an affair, a quick fling, a one-night stand.  The short story dwells in the biggest of all worlds, that of possibility.

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Flash fiction is different. You don’t see it all too much, but when you do it stands out. Rather than a full-length short story that focuses on character and plot and motivation and verisimilitude and all that annoying shit they teach you as highly important in MFA school, a flash piece allows a prose writer to concentrate on a single image or emotion or the bones of a story, much the way a poet would. Of course, flash pieces can tell complete stories, and often they do, but I love the quick hit of flash. If flash is crack, traditional short stories are heroin, and novels are booze. A short piece of a couple hundred words can fuck someone up just as intensely and permanently as a longer piece, but it does so instantly and leaves the reader wanting more.

“If flash is crack, traditional short stories are heroin, and novels are booze.” 

The crazy thing is that it’s way harder to write a good flash piece than it is to write a full story. The writer has no time to fuck around with superfluous words in flash; there’s less margin for error, so bad writing is obvious in shorter works where it may be obscured by interesting characters or exciting action in longer pieces. It can also be harder to read because the author doesn’t hold a reader’s hand through a flash piece. There’s no time for backstory or detailed explanations. Readers must connect the dots themselves; generally, metaphors aren’t explained in much detail. Really, it’s just baking soda and cocaine. That’s it.

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Imagine the scene in that Florida hotel room in the hour after Seymour Glass rid himself of half of his skull.

Or picture how Hulga managed to get out of the barn and make it home once Manly Pointer took off with her prosthetic leg. And what did he do with the leg, sling it over his shoulder like a fishing rod and stroll into the next town, pushing his Bibles door to door?

Good short stories make me uneasy. On the one hand, I’m satisfied by being able to enter their fully-formed, near-perfectly constructed worlds in a single serving of reading. On the other, having left the inhabitants of these worlds, I often wonder what happened in the aftermath. The experience of reading a short story, the incongruity of feeling satisfaction while wanting to know more, makes me anxious, but the discomfort is not altogether unpleasant, as it is a product of my concern, which only arises when I believe the place I just visited is real. This is the trick of all fiction, but I believe the short story can inspire it most powerfully.

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In June 2004, I searched for 7 Eccles Street in Dublin. I never found it. I didn’t find it because it’s no longer there, the victim of nuns who extended a maternity hospital. I looked for the address because James Joyce made it famous in Ulysses, and Ulysses made me feel like fiction is alive. I read Ulysses because I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, because I had already read “Araby”–one of Joyce’s short stories from his collection Dubliners, and his only short story to be widely anthologized. If there’s one piece of Joyce’s writing that a non-literary people have read, it’s probably “Araby.” It’s short; it’s accessible; it’s ubiquitous.

The short story is indispensable as a stepping stone for writers too. It’s a form of its own that stands alone without having to lead to a novel, sure–don’t get me wrong–but for writers who write in both forms, it’s usually the short story that comes to the surface before the novel. It’s a way to get really good at capturing a mood or a moment. It’s decorating a room instead of a house–nearly immediate gratification.

Joyce’s works got longer as he got older, which I think is a beautiful transition. But the stories got him there; they flung him clear to Finnegans Wake, just as a high-school reading of “Araby” eventually sent me across the Atlantic searching for an address that held incalculable meaning for me: a three-storey Georgian torn down and replaced, but kept alive by perpetuating tiny off-shoot stories all its own.

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With stories whose endings are visible from the first sentence, or inferable from the length of web browser scrollbars, I don’t release my awareness of real time as I do with narratives long enough to settle into an illusion of merging with them. Instead I become acutely aware of surface tension, the bent boundary between the story’s time signature and mine.

Much fiction of a thousand words and under pauses and circles in syntax and detail choice descended from Gordon Lish and Amy Hempel. Context, excluded or eluded to, becomes such enormous blankness that the magnifying sentences seem barely to move through it. Perception seems not fleeting but permanent.

Other stories end up at flash length by shaking off the spell of Chekhov and Flaubert, paring away naturalistic scene making for storytelling reminiscent of biblical narrative, myth, or fairy tale, baring dialogue and actions in their full strangeness. Time accelerates. Years might pass in a page.

Boundaries never vanish with flash fiction. That, and its newness, allow for experiments in syntax, subject, and effect that seem to me less frequently ventured, or perhaps accepted, at five or six thousand words. There have been so many short stories. Perhaps there’s too settled a sense of where they need to arrive and how they get there. Flash seems always a stop on the way to somewhere. It might be anything.

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It is well known that the short story was invented by the Man in the Moon for two important reasons worth reminding ourselves of no matter where we live or what we’re made of: the first is that the Man in the Moon always found it difficult to finish a novel because of the instability of the moon’s light conditions. Imagine having to read with a flickering candle light—no fun. The other one has to do with love. The Man in the Moon loves Luna, the Woman in the Moon, the mother of menstruation: he found that reading a novel takes him for too long too far away from her. The multitude of characters, the often complicated plot, the superimposed structure of the classical, readable novel make it hard to simply dive in and climb out of it. The short story, on the other hand, especially in the form of its younger cousin, the flash story, is more often wild and won’t mind reckless, rickety reading. The short story is pure and easy, short and succulent. But perhaps you find this hard to believe even though your own mother and father told you about the Man and the Woman in the Moon, the projection of humanity on the round, scarred, friendly face of Earth’s eternal companion. Perhaps you have a much better, more rational, modern explanation for the existence of the short story. As things stand between us, I like my own version, not in the least because it’s short.

Read this post in German/auf Deutsch.

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Jayne Anne Phillips, a former writing instructor of mine at Rutgers-Newark, and a fantastic writer of the short form, referred to the “flash” piece as “one-page fiction.” (She made these pieces famous in her impossibly good Black Tickets.) I don’t think she liked the term flash, and I know many others who despise it. I, on the other hand, think it’s the perfect word to describe how this particular form affects the reader.

It reminds me of the creepy guy lurking in the Wal-Mart parking lot, sunglasses and trench coat. His unfortunate victim is made vulnerable to a quick, frantic peek, and is then left disoriented, forced to make sense of what she just saw. It’s the speed of the event that makes it so intense, and memorable. (I should probably make it clear that I don’t condone this behavior.) Let’s take another scenario: our creepy flasher approaches someone, opens his trench, and holds it open for an interminable ten minutes. Where would the intensity be? It wouldn’t—the duration would dilute it. Oh, it’s a penis, the flashee might think, that’s all. Just a small, wrinkly penis.

[A] creepy flasher approaches someone, opens his trench, and holds it open for an interminable ten minutes. Where would the intensity be?

But that’s not how it works. And that’s not how it works for the flash story either, which sneaks up on the reader, whips open its coat revealing something ugly or beautiful or profound or sad or strange, and then ends, just as abruptly, leaving the reader to question what s/he had read. And it’s in that pondering that the story grows. It becomes.

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When Atticus Books first invited me to submit thoughts on the short story, I immediately formed grand plans. I was going to write such an impassioned and persuasive essay that the masses were going to remember. For a brief moment, I was going to personally lead the renaissance of the short story. However, I then thought a little deeper.

After all, who could have read Hemmingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and still need an explanation? No essay of mine could illustrate the story any better than Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Anyone who hasn’t read these stories, or others like them, simply needs to. No explanation could do any better. Besides, somebody who refused to read short stories probably also wouldn’t read my essay.

No essay of mine could illustrate the story any better than Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Anyone who hasn’t read [this story], or others like [it], simply needs to. No explanation could do any better.

What I love about short stories is Etgar Keret’s “Fatso” and Haruki Murakami’s “The Second Bakery Attack.” What I mean is that I love the stories themselves. Though I think that short stories (due to the amount of information that the human brain can hold at one time) have the ability to present a perfect divine singularity for us to contemplate, I think the magic is in what people have done rather than the form itself.

That being said, what some people have done is truly sacred. No matter what else she does in her life, I will always remember Joyce Carol Oates as the writer of “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Anyone who has experienced the magic already knows. Anyone who hasn’t just won’t understand.

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I wonder why short fiction isn’t as popular as the novel. Maybe because it’s more like a one night stand than the slower, longer term and, dare I say, more respectable relationships we have with certain novels. But I like the idea that within the span of a single night, in just an hour perhaps, I can glimpse another world and what it feels like being there. Some novels take days before you can walk away with that feeling. And the “short” stuff may be just the thing in a world where people have less time and patience (not to mention shrinking attention spans).

The downside, maybe, is that short fiction tends to gratify us too quickly. On the upside, the good short always leaves the reader wanting more. A good short story is never too long, whereas the same thing might not be said for a good novel. I always wish a Flannery O’Connor story were the first chapter of a thousand-page epic. My favorite short fiction always resonates for some time after reading it, often times as long, or longer, than a good novel. Bartleby haunts me as much as Ahab. Maybe more. A sampling of what I’m talking about: Melville, Tolstoy, Kafka, Philip K. Dick, Robert Coover, Raymond Carver, Donald Barthelme, William H. Gass, Samuel R. Delaney, William T. Vollmann, Harold Jaffe, Eurudice, Elizabeth Ellen, Christine Boyka Kluge and Daryl Scroggins.

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I hate short stories. Hate to read them, not a big fan of writing them. I like novels, I like the feeling I’m entering an entirely new world, or creating one. The best novels can build their own vocabulary, even a new language altogether. Short stories are windows. Windows are nice, especially with curtains, and in my novels there’s always at least one character either staring out of a window or looking into one. Usually frustrated. Because looking through a window is not the same as being there.

The best novels can build their own vocabulary, even a new language altogether. Short stories are windows.

Of course, most novels read like extended short stories. And most short stories read pretty much like all the others. I’m bitter.

I’m not fair. A novel is to a short story what an electric guitar is to an acoustic. And don’t get me started on classical guitars.

They’re really quite different beasts, creating different types of music. Sure they look the same, and you can play some of the same things on them. But that overlooks the potential of each to achieve something unique, something impossible to produce through any other art form.

Which brings me to flash fiction. If novels are the world, if short stories are a window, flash fiction is that one sudden sharp thought that lets you know you understand the world, all of it, now, for this moment. If only for this moment. They’re not the guitar, they’re that one perfect note.

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The short story is the crystalline form of the novel; that is, it takes the essence of what makes a novel (character, plot, dramatic development) and condenses it into a form that is whole and pleasing. What the novelist accomplishes in two or three hundred pages, the short storiest, if I can coin that term, achieves in, say, twenty or ten or, even, one. Some authors have even written the one sentence short story (e.g. Hemmingway’s “For sale: baby shoes, never worn,” which consists of just six words!).

Having written both short stories and novels, I can say that there are definitive differences between the two. The novel is like taking a very long walk in a place you’ve never been. Whenever I go to a city I’ve never visited (my first trip to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia comes to mind), I like to spend days exploring both the main streets and the hidden alleys . The novel does the same: as an author, you have the time to meander and discover.

The short story does not afford such luxury, though a skilled writer can create that illusion, taking readers to new places ever so briefly, tantalizing them with just the right word or tone. Discovery, it seems, can be just as satisfying, if not more, in a flash.

The short story, I believe, harks back to the oral tradition, where entertainment consisted of the telling of a tale: in prose form or in ballad. Hence, Homer. Hence, Chaucer. Hence, 1001 Arabian Nights.

When I began fiction writing, I used to think the smart thing to do was to tackle the novel straight away. I knew (although I wasn’t exactly right) that a novel could get a power agent and a big-time publisher and transform a writer into a career novelist overnight. But a funny thing happened. My novels weren’t getting read.

I think writing short stories forces a writer to do more with fewer words. That condensed writing later serves an author working on larger works as well. With a short story, you have to do all the same work—create believable characters and a plot and story arc—but you have to do it in a short number of pages. That takes skill and work.

Short stories force a writer to do more with fewer words.

The other upside of writing short stories is that, although you may be paid in mere pennies or pages, getting published in literary journals gives you bonus points when approaching an agent or publisher with a book. I noticed more agents and publishers read my submissions (based on the feedback I received) after I had published some short stories in reputable journals. And I believe that helped me land my most excellent agent and publisher.

Eric D. Goodman writes stories, novels, and novels-in-stories. His stories can be found in the pages of The Baltimore Review, The Pedestal, The Potomac, JMWW, Slow Trains, Arabesques Review, Smile Hon You’re In Baltimore, Four Cornered Universe, and New Lines from the Old Line State: An Anthology of Maryland Writers. His novel-in-stories, Tracks, was published by Atticus Books. His novel, Womb, is currently with his literary agent.