Notes on flash fiction

From “Going Long. Going Short”
Grant Faulkner
New York Times

“Flash fiction is about ambiguity,” writes the flash author Nathan Leslie. My memory, like that of many of us, tends not to follow a narrative trajectory with rising action as in a conventional plot, but is rather a collage smattered with as many small mundane moments as big, dramatic ones. Moods mix with events. The memory of a scent, an illness, a random day at the beach, a slight, can be as piquant and poignant to me as any more dramatic, plot-worthy event.

Such moments invite a different sort of treatment. I learned that each line of a flash story must carry a symbolic weight that moves the story forward. Yet, at the same time, the gaps within and around the story speak as large as the text itself. “The words of the last line should create a silence, a white space in which the reader breathes. The story enters that breath, and continues,” writes another flash writer Jayne Anne Phillips.

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Five examples of flash fiction: "Profile," by Andrew O. Dougas; "200 Cameras," by Shoshauna Shy; and "The Longest Con," by Jennifer A. Howard.