So as I may have mentioned previously, I am trying to not only write a blog but to actually write stories (short and long). Well, turns out it is quite a bit easier to blog three-to-four times a week than to write either short stories or novels, and I’m starting to run into dangerous ground in which the blog becomes the product in itself rather than part of the platform for a larger career in writing. So, I have been hunting around online investigating writing and writers’ sites and requests for submissions and other interesting tidbits of that nature. Turns out there are niches for everything, and there is pretty much a writing format for just about everything too – there are no longer just short stories and novels (with the occasional novella, somehow always written by Stephen King, thrown into the mix for flavor), but there are about eight billion variations on each as well. One of my new favorites, and a format I find intriguing for a host of reasons, is Flash Fiction.

What is Flash Fiction, you ask? Well kind reader, let Auntie Jill tell you. Flash Fiction appears to be the net result of the sound-bite, short-attention-span-theater universe we currently live in. Flash Fiction pieces are stories of less than 1,000 words – and there is no minimum page requirement either. A Flash Fiction story can be any length you want as long as it does not exceed 1,000 words. 1,000 words, she said. And some definitions give you less than that – yes, honestly, an entire story in max 500 or even 360 words. To give you an idea of just how short that is, the writing you have read on here through the end of this sentence is exactly 298 words, according to Microsoft Word. So Flash Fiction stories at their longest are limited to just over three times as long as these two paragraphs – and sometimes are barely a paragraph longer than this.
Continue reading When Littler Actually is Bigger: On Flash Fiction (Includes “The Boys”)