Flash Fiction International
Page 15
Alex Epstein
THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT
If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.
Ernest Hemingway
It is laborious and impoverishing madness to compose vast books, to expound over five hundred pages an idea that orally can be expressed perfectly well in a few minutes.
Jorge Luis Borges
Stories can be as short as a sentence.
Randall Jarrell
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I have the feeling that [my] little stories are a bit like novels from which all the air has been removed. And that might be my definition of a novel: forty lines plus two cubic meters of air. I’ve settled for simply the forty lines: they take up less space. And with books, of course, you know that space is always an enormous problem.
Giorgio Manganelli
When a story is compressed so much, the matter of it tends to require more size: that is, in order to make it work in so small a space its true subject must be proportionately larger.
Richard Bausch
When I start to write a very short story, I always imagine it as a novel. In some parallel universe, there must be a crazy writer who is actually writing those novels.
Alex Epstein
A good short-short is short but not small, light but not slight.
Ku Ling
Brevity is the soul of wit.
William Shakespeare
Brevity is the sister of talent.
Anton Chekhov
Flash fiction is re-incarnated brevity. In our warming world, brevity is green. In our world of competing media, brevity is nimble. In our world where time is the most precious commodity, brevity is eternal.
Mark Budman
The Soul’s distinct connection
With immortality
Is best disclosed by Danger
Or quick Calamity—
As Lightning on a Landscape
Exhibits Sheets of Place—
Not yet suspected—but for Flash—
And Click—and Suddenness.
Emily Dickinson
THE ART OF FLASH
Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.
Stephen King
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
Mark Twain
A short short is not a single thing done a single way. So many are sharp, luminescent puzzles, arresting flashes in the dark that leave us a touch of wonder or alarm. Some are complete little worlds in a page and some are simply scene fragments in two. Of course at times there is wordplay and often slanted imagery, even the jarring moment. Often the jarring moment. Some are tricky seductions, some brash and confrontational. Many start and then stop and either you feel like you missed a step or you get the joke. The language can prance, which is a kind of walk that takes you in a circle.
Ron Carlson
The letter I have written today is longer than usual because I lacked the time to make it shorter.
Blaise Pascal
Every sentence, every phrase, every word has to fight for its life.
Crawford Kilian
Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on.
Raymond Carver
Omit needless words.
William Strunk
I try to leave out the parts that people skip.
Elmore Leonard
THE CULTURE OF FLASH
The first story ever, I read somewhere, appears on an ancient Egyptian tablet and declares that “John went out on a trip.” How do we know this is a flash fiction and not a document? Because no one during that time period could have left his town on his own will. Moreover, it encapsulates the high rhetoric of sudden fiction: it has a character (I call him “John,” but he has 1,000 names); there is a dominant action (the story-telling is fully present); and what is shown or said happens in time. Not less important, it announces the very rule of any story—the breaking of a code. John is an adventurer who stands against authority and decides to leave, to explore, to know.
Julio Ortega
Microfiction is the writing of the new millennium, for it is very close to the paratactic fragmentation of the hypertextual writing of the electronic age.
Lauro Zavala
A contributing factor to the genre’s future dissemination is that short-shorts are both device-independent and compatible with today’s technology. They offer relative freedom from censorship not enjoyed in other media.
Aili Mu and Julie Chiu
Flash Fiction, or wei xing xiao shuo, as it is known in China today, also goes by the name of Minute Story, Pocket-Size Story, Palm-Size Story, and, perhaps most evocatively and, in my opinion, most accurately (for China at least)—Smoke-Long Story, which promises to let the reader relish the sights and sounds of an entire make-believe world before he or she has time to finish one delicious cigarette.
Shouhua Qi
The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then the queen died of grief is a plot.
E. M. Forster
Grief
The King died. Long live the King. And then the Queen died. She was buried beside him. The King died and then the Queen died of grief. This was the posted report. And no one said a thing. But you can’t die of grief. It can take away your appetite and keep you in your chamber, but not forever. It isn’t terminal. Eventually you’ll come out and want a toddy. The Queen died subsequent to the King, but not of grief. I know the royal coroner, have seen him around, a young guy with a good job. The death rate for the royalty is so much lower than that of the general populace. The coroner was summoned by the musicians, found her on the bedroom floor, checked for a pulse, and wrote “Grief” on the form. It looked good. And it was necessary. It answered the thousand questions about the state of the nation.
He didn’t examine the body, perform an autopsy. If he had, he wouldn’t have found grief. “There is no place for grief in the body.” He would have found a blood alcohol level of one point nine and he would have found a clot of improperly chewed tangerine in the lady’s throat which she had ingested while laughing.
But this seems a fine point. The Queen is dead. Long live her grief. Long live the Duke of Reddington and the Earl of Halstar who were with me that night entertaining the Queen in her chambers. She was a vigorous sort. And long live the posted report which will always fill a royal place in this old kingdom.
Ron Carlson
FLASH THEORY SOURCES
Abbasi, Talat, from her author commentary in the “Afternotes” section of Sudden Fiction International.
Banks, Russell, from the “Afterwords” section of Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories.
Bausch, Richard, from his interview in Five Points magazine.
Baxter, Charles, from the “Afterwords” section of Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories.
Borges, Jorge Luis, from the prologue to his book The Garden of Forking Paths. Quotation translated by Daniel Tunnard.
Budman, Mark, from his essay “Expose Yourself to Flash,” in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, edited by Tara L. Masih.
Carlson, Ron, “A short short is not a single thing done in a single way,” from his introduction to Claudia Smith’s The Sky Is a Well and Other Shorts.
Carlson, Ron, “Grief,” from Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Really Short Stories, edited by Jerome Stern.
Carver, Raymond, from “A Storyteller’s Shoptalk,” an article in Th
e New York Times, February 15, 1981, in the Books section.
Chekhov, Anton, from his letter to A. P. Chekhov, April 11, 1889.
Chen, Yizhi, from Loud Sparrows: Contemporary Chinese Short-Shorts, edited and translated by Aili Mu, Julie Chiu, and Howard Goldblatt.
Coles, Katharine. Original statement written for Flash Fiction International, first articulated at the Writers@Work Conference, Alta, Utah, June 2013.
Dickinson, Emily, Poem #974.
Epstein, Alex. “On the Time Difference Between Poetry and Prose” is from his book Blue Has No South. Translation by Becka Mara McKay.
Epstein, Alex, from the journal World Literature Today, September 2012, in the interview section of the feature “Very Short Fiction.”
Flick, Sherrie, from her essay “Flash in a Pan: Writing Outside of Time’s Boundaries,” in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, edited by Tara L. Masih.
Forster, E. M., from Aspects of the Novel.
Greenberg, Alvin, from “Why Is the Short Story Short and the Short-Short Even Shorter?,” in the “Afterwords” section of Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories.
Hemingway, Ernest, from Death in the Afternoon.
Howe, Irving, from his introduction to Short Shorts: An Anthology of Shortest Stories, edited by Irving Howe and Ilana Wiener Howe.
Jarrell, Randall, from his introduction, “Stories,” to The Anchor Book of Stories.
Kilian, Crawford, from his book Writing for the Web.
King, Stephen, from his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.
Ku Ling, from Loud Sparrows: Contemporary Chinese Short-Shorts, edited and translated by Aili Mu, Julie Chiu, and Howard Goldblatt.
Leonard, Elmore, from the New York Times series Writers on Writing: “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle,” by Elmore Leonard, July 16, 2001.
Manganelli, Giorgio, quoted on the dust jacket of his book Centuria: One Hundred Ouroboric Novels, 2005.
Moore, Dinty W., from “The Moment of Truth: An Introduction,” in Sudden Stories: The MAMMOTH Book of Miniscule Fiction, edited by Dinty W. Moore.
Mu, Aili, and Julie Chiu. Loud Sparrows: Contemporary Chinese Short-Shorts, edited and translated by Aili Mu, Julie Chiu, and Howard Goldblatt.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, from Twilight of the Idols.
Oates, Joyce Carol, from the “Afternotes” section of Sudden Fiction International.
Ortega, Julio, from his essay “A Flash before the Bang,” in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, edited by Tara L. Masih.
Paley, Grace, from the “Afterwords” section of Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories.
Pascal, Blaise, from a collection of letters called “Lettres provinciales,” 1657. First English translation 1658, Les Provinciales, or, The Mystery of Jesuitisme by Blaise Pascal, Letter 16: Postscript, printed for Richard Royston, London.
Phillips, Jayne Anne, from her essay “‘Cheers,’ (or) How I Taught Myself to Write,” in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, edited by Tara L. Masih.
Purpura, Lia, adapted with her permission from section lead-ins in her essay “On Miniatures” in the journal Brevity (in the Craft Essays section).
Qi, Shouhua, from his essay “Old Wine in New Bottles?: Flash Fiction from Contemporary China,” in The Rose Metal Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, edited by Tara L. Masih.
Scroggins, Daryl. “Parting” is from his collection This Is Not the Way We Came In.
Shakespeare, William, from Hamlet, spoken by Polonius in Act 2, Scene 2.
Simic, Charles, from his book The World Doesn’t End.
Strand, Mark, from the “Afterwords” section of Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories.
Strunk, William, from The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White.
Swartwood, Robert, from his introduction to Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer, edited by Robert Swartwood.
Szijártó, István, from “Four Arguments for Microhistory” in Rethinking History 6:2, in the section “Miniatures.”
Unferth, Deb Olin, from her essay “Put Yourself in Danger: An Examination of Diane Williams’s Courageous Short,” in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, edited by Tara L. Masih.
Valenzuela, Luisa, from her introduction to Sudden Fiction Latino.
Villa, Pancho, in Andrea Saenz’s story “Everyone’s Abuelo Can’t Have Ridden with Pancho Villa,” in Sudden Fiction Latino. She notes that Nicholas Casey reported in his online article in The Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2010, “According to the lore, his final words were: ‘It shouldn’t end this way. Tell them I said something.’”
Zavala, Lauro, from his first article on the subject, delivered at the first international conference on minifiction, 1998, held in Mexico City. Translation by Steven J. Stewart. The full article is in the first issue of the e-journal El Cuento en Red.
CONTRIBUTOR NOTES
Daniel Alarcón was born in Lima, Peru, and grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. In 2010, The New Yorker named him one of the best 20 Writers Under 40, and his most recent novel, At Night We Walk in Circles, was a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award. He is executive producer of Radio Ambulante, a Spanish-language narrative journalism podcast.
Sherman Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Among his best-known works are the story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and the film Smoke Signals, based on a story from that collection for which he cowrote the screenplay. A few of his most recent awards are the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Odyssey Award for best audiobook for young people (read by Alexie), and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
Chris Andrews is an Australian writer, translator, and teacher whose translations include books by Roberto Bolaño and César Aira. He is the author of a critical study, Poetry and Cosmogony: Science in the Writing of Queneau and Ponge, and a collection of poems, Cut Lunch.
Edgar Omar Avilés was born in 1980 in Morelia, Michoacán. He is the author of several books, including La noche es luz de un sol negro, Guiichi, Luna Cinema, Cabalgata en duermevela, and No respiramos: inflamos fantasmas. His stories have appeared in The Best Mexican Short Stories.
Juan José Barrientos is the author of Versiones, Ficción-historia, and La gata revolcada. He is especially concerned with the rewriting or recycling of literary works. He studied at the University of Heidelberg, was a lecturer at the Sorbonne, and has taught at the University of Veracruz for many years.
Jensen Beach, author of the story collection For Out of the Heart Proceed, teaches at the University of Illinois. His stories and reviews have appeared widely in literary magazines and he is a web editor at Hobart.
Ari Mikael Behn is a Norwegian author and husband of Princess Märtha Louise. He has published three novels and two collections of short stories.
Georgia Birnie has had a lifelong interest in languages and has lived in Central America and France. She lives in Auckland, New Zealand, where she is completing a master’s degree in psychology.
Roberto Bolaño was a Chilean author of novels, short stories, poems, and essays. In 1999, he won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666. He has been described by The New York Times as “the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation.”
Elena Bossi is an Argentine poet, essayist, literary critic, and editor whose work has been published in numerous magazines and journals. Her many books include Rags and Magical Beings of Argentina.
Juan Carlos Botero is a Colombian writer and journalist. Winner of the Juan Rulfo Short Story Award, he has published two novels, two books of essays, and two collections of short stories. One collection, The Seeds of Time: Epiphanies, has been heralded as “a new genre o
f literature.”
Nathan Budoff is an artist who has exhibited in Boston, New York, Chicago, Bogotá, Medellín, San Juan, Santa Fe, and Minnesota. He is an associate professor of art at the University of Puerto Rico and continues to exhibit regularly with Galería 356 in San Juan.
Ron Carlson is the author of ten books of fiction, including the novel The Signal. His newest novel is Return to Oakpine. His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and other journals and anthologies. He is the director of the graduate program in fiction at the University of California, Irvine.
Antoine Cassar has translated a number of his fellow Maltese authors into English; he is also an avid translator into Maltese of Neruda, Whitman, and Tagore. His poem Merħba won the United Planet Writing Prize in 2009; his poem Passport has been published in eight languages.
José Chaves holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon. In 1999 he published a bilingual anthology of Latin American sudden fiction titled The Book of Brevity; selections from it were reprinted in the anthology Sudden Fiction Latino. His most recent book, The Contract of Love, is a memoir about his quixotic Colombian father.
Chen Qiyou was born in 1953. He is a professor of Chinese at a teachers’ college in Taiwan.