Flash Fiction

>>9733292
my diary

>>9733360
desu

I asked this a while ago because I was trying to write some flash fiction for magazines.
One anon recommended these:
Donald Barthelme
Flannery O'Connor's "Why Do The Heathen Rage?"

I don't know too much about the genre, but I believe it's possible to make something compelling out of it. Probably won't ever have the depth of a novel or even a short story, but still something good.

>>9734269
>Probably won't ever have the depth of a novel or even a short story,
How so? A sonnet can't have the reach and magnitude of an epic poem but that doesn't prevent it from discussing its theme with equal skill, depth and nuance.

>>9734291
Yeah, maybe you're right. Maybe I was too hasty in that conclusion.
I guess I meant in scope more than skill or quality. By its nature, a flash fiction can't really cover as much as a novel. But I agree that if skillfully done, it could fully cover its theme.

> A nineteen-year-old english major with dyed hair and bangs finishes her third cigarette of the night. Her mother worries about her health, and her father thinks they're a waste of the spending money he gives her. The english major tells them she only smokes ironically.
> She opens up a brand-new Moleskine ® notebook. Her last one is mostly empty, but flipping past four pages of unfinished short stories before writing gives her a bad vibe. She tucks her pen between her lips as though it's a fourth cig, and thinks about how beautiful her thoughts are.
> After putting down about five hundred words, the english major is tired. She reads over what she wrote. It doesn't go anywhere. It's just a brief description of someone vaguely like her.
> Above the two-and-a-half paragraphs, she writes: "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young (Wo)Man (Flash Fiction)."
> The english major opens a bottle of wine and watches Game of Thrones for six hours. She passes out on the couch.

>>9734446
>I guess I meant in scope more than skill or quality. By its nature, a flash fiction can't really cover as much as a novel.
I understand, I was suspicious like you at first as well. But, again, if we use that sort of logic where the number of words affects the quality of art, short stories as such would be inferior to novels and sonnets to epics. That's not a completely indefensible position, sure, but when you put it like that your gut feeling says it shouldn't be true.

>>9734450
damn

>>9734450
This is why I hate English majors lol

>>9734450
Kek. This is exactly what I imagine when I think about someone writing flash fiction.

OP, flash fiction is degenerate. It's writing for people with not enough attention span to read a short story, and written by people who do not have the dedication to write something with depth and length.


>>9734291
This is a really bad analogy. A good sonnet has an insane amount of depth and is not at all easy to write. The point of poetry is to say a lot with few words. The point of fiction is not to express a theme with as few words as possible. That isn't to say that it's impossible to create good flash fiction, but I think that we can agree on some level that it IS degenerate, as it conforms to this generation that cannot read more than a minute or two without flipping back to facebook.

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>>9734735
>flash fiction is degenerate. It's writing for people with not enough attention span to read a short story, and written by people who do not have the dedication to write something with depth and length.

Flash fiction's been around since the 90's. Some would argue earlier than that, since Borges wrote similar stuff late in his life. And, at it's best, it's a great outlet for satire and experimentation. There may never be a Great American Flash Fiction or an Epic Flash Fiction, but there's plenty of philosophically and prosodically interesting flash fictions.

Like with poetry, the skill floor is low, but the skill ceiling is high. Read some of the good stuff and get back to us. Never write off an entire genre or medium.

t. >>9734450

Lydia Davis and Russell Edson are both well-known for their microfiction. Lydia Davis has a couple stories that are a single sentence.

If the writer is competent, microfiction can be pretty rewarding. The biggest problem I find with a lot of microfiction is that the story becomes far too abstract because the author is more intent on brevity than clarity. Effective flash fiction and microfiction can only be written by someone who has a firm understanding of--and control over--word economy.

That and basic story structure, obviously. There's a difference between a bit of fleshed-out microfiction and a couple of obscurant sentences that gesture toward some sense of form or structure.