Read my shorts

I'm not sure that I really write Flash, but I've had about a dozen short texts published. As well as compact 1000-word stories, there's also comedy and Oulipo. A few are online -

• The Economics of despair - Everyday fiction (1000)
• Out - Ink, sweat and tears (400)
• Met a Star's Eyes/Metastasise - Journal of Microliterature (600)
• Nobody's Perfect - Ink, sweat and tears (250)
• Russian Doll - Aesthetica (300)

The latest one ("The Word Limit", 300 words) will be in the next Stand Magazine.

I've also added my Flash fiction outlets page to this blog for people who have Flash to send out.

"Short Fiction in Theory and Practice"

Short Fiction in Theory and Practice (Vol 1) has some interesting articles. I'll mention 2 that offer reasons for the devaluing of some genres

In 'Making micro meanings: reading and writing microfiction', Holly Howitt-Dring says that the classifications of poetry, prose poetry and Flash (which she calls microfiction) are blurred, mentioning that Forché's "The Colonel" has been in both Flash-fiction and prose-poem anthologies. But she also thinks that at the core of microfiction is a discernable genre - "Stealing poetic techniques, truncating those of prose, it seems like the offspring of some ill-fated alliance, but in fact microfiction uses the best parts of both genres and is a genre in its own right, as it functions and speaks in a new and different way to both" (p.57). She tries to identify some common features of pieces that are classified as Flash/microfiction. As well as being formatted as prose,

• "Microfictions usually start in the middle of an action, or, in some cases, a thought.", p.53
• "Microfiction is often only about a small idea, and the relevance of the miniscule of the major, and focusing on an image, which is, in this case simple, highlights the consequence of the small thing.". p.54
• "microfictions are ... small, and subtle, epiphanies ... reached not by some narrative trick, but by a realisation that the moment depicted in the microfiction has changed everything, that there has been a shift in what the reader believed or expected, and that this has had significance.", p.54

She writes that the lack of space for prolonged character development has led to the use of the punch-line as a way to make the reader experience the large consequences of small things, but over-dependence on this may devalue the genre. Even reliance on the more subtle ways of hinting at (rather than showing) change may be detrimental to the genre - "Because microfiction could be viewed as stories working solely by implication, I feel that they have been mistrusted and sidelined in literature" (p.56)

I knew that popular magazines used to publish lots of stories (by Conan-Doyle, etc). Sarah Whitehead's 'Reader as consumer: the magazine short story' points out that even Joyce, Borges and Mansfield were published in strange places (Joyce had 3 stories published in a farmer's magazine ("The Irish Homestead"), Borges was in "Playboy", and Katherine Mansfield's stories were published alongside ads for furniture and face treatment). The article suggests that magazines influenced the development of the short story. Here are some quotes

• "At a time when virtually every piece of short fiction was initially and often only published in a periodical, the short story was just one of the many texts including articles, advertising and illustrations ... tempting both impulse buyers and faithful subscribers who would be lured by fact and fiction through pages of advertisements", p.72
• "by the 1890s The Strand was selling more than half a million copies a month", p.74
• "The unprecedented and unrepeated growth of the magazine industry, which underpinned the growth and popularity of the short story genre, was the catalyst, if not the source of twentieth-century critical dismissal of the form.", p.79
• "The growth of the magazine industry at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century maps the most important chapter in the history of the short story and has directly influenced the nature of the form as it exists today ... The magazine story has imbued the short story genre as a whole with the value of the disposable, the appeal of the marginalized and the inexorable link between literature and consumer culture.", p.82

Flash Fiction in the news this week

Two happenings this week illustrate the rise of Flash Fiction

• Tania Hershman's Flash Fiction is going to be on BBC's Radio 4 this week. See the Afternoon Reading: Flash! page for details.
• The deadline for the Bridport Prize for Flash (£1,000 1st prize, max 250 words) is 30th June.

A list of Flash outlets

The magazines below welcome Flash. Magazines have a more tolerant attitude nowadays, so even if a magazine doesn't explicitly welcome Flash, submission might be worthwhile even if it's a poetry magazine.

Magazine	Word limit	Guidelines	Notes
Boston Literary Magazine	=50, =100, 250	online	"Strong characters"
Paragraph Planet	=75	online
Foundling Review	100-2000	online	Pieces with a "strong emotional core"
dogzplot	200	online	Flash videos accepted
six little things	250	online	Themed
Literary Bohemian	300, 1200	online	Travel-inspired
Flash	360	online	A5 booklet
Quick fiction	500	online	Paper
Vestal review	500	online	Not Jun, Jul, Dec, Jan. Paper. Pays
Flash fiction online	500-1000	online	Pays $50
Everyday fiction	1000	online	Pays $3
Hobart	1000	online	WWW and paper versions. Pays
Eclectic Flash	1000	online
JMWW	1000	online
Word Riot	1000	online	"Edgy... experimental"
FRiGG	1000	online
Flashquake	1000	online	Not Feb, May, Aug, or Nov. Pays
Wigleaf	1000	online
Smokelong quarterly	1000	online
VerbSap	1000	online
The Pedestal Magazine	1000	online	Has reading periods. Pays
Night Train	1500	online
20x20	1500	online	Loosely themed. Rich graphics
elimae	any	online
neon	any	online	Pays
Memorious	any	online
Shadowtrain		online	A poetry magazine really

Flash

People not uncommonly say that short stories are more like poetry than novels. Some short, single-focus stories may well be mistaken for poetry, just as some poetry gets called "chopped-up prose". In the journey from story to poem there used to be a no-man's land of unpublishable short prose. The only hope of publication for these pieces was in poetry magazines. Texts in the format of recipes or shopping lists became poems. Anecdotes and vignettes couldn't be prose-lineated in poetry magazines because they weren't "Prose Poems" - a term that had rather been taken over by surrealists and erstwhile experimentalists (Baudelaire, Russel Edson etc.) So they got a line-breaks make-over.

Now the literary landscape's changed - we have Flash. Flash isn't a genre or a mode. Definitions vary, but in practise it's short (less than 1000 words, sometimes a lot less) and doesn't use poetic line-breaks (though it may still use line-breaks the way that adverts, lists, etc use them). Usually it employs narrative, character or plot, but sometimes it uses juxtaposition. The style may be poetic without it needing to be a poem, though the more it jettisons traditional story features (character, plot, length) and adopts poetic ones (sound effects, form) the more like a poem it will be.

I think Flash writers reading some poetry magazines for the first time might see familiar material but might wonder about all the line-breaks - "It's Flash with hiccups". Some free verse writers don't like adjusting let alone removing line-breaks though they have trouble explaining what they are for - "they just feel right" ... "they just came out that way" ... "they give the imagery room to breathe", etc. The poets might indeed be able to point to a line-break that introduces a telling pause, neglecting to explain what the pauses presumably introduced by all the other line-breaks are for. The "free" in the phrase "free verse" means to me that the author's freed of the need to put line-breaks in just for the sake of a restrictive form, but that freedom has become a duty, with many poems adopting the regular rectangular stanzas of older formal poetry.

I don't think there's such a thing as a neutral line-break. They're never hidden characters. To me each line-break added is an effect that is potentially powerful but can as easily backfire. And yet, reading poetry one might believe that line-breaks don't have to pass stringent tests to justify their existence the way that adverbs do. Irrelevant ones are politely ignored, like someone's speech impediment. Take Catherine Smith's "Snakebite" (in the Forward book of poetry 2009). It's 13 3-line stanzas ending with "Tomorrow/ we'll feel sick as dogs. But tonight,/ here, under a bright, full moon,// we're amazing, and as we hug/ on my doorstep, I taste you,/ kiss the snakebite off your lips". If you gave a point for each line-break that did something and deducted a point for line-breaks that did nothing (or less than nothing), I don't think you'd come out with a positive score. It's not an auto-cue text, it's literature, so why not let the story speak for itself? "If in doubt, leave it out" is a maxim that can be applied to more than words. Flash takes the radical approach of eliminating the poetical line-break.

I think many poems written in the past few decades in retrospect fall more appropriately in the Flash category - poems like Carolyn Forche's The Colonel for example. Simon Armitage's poems in the Winter 2009 issue of "The Rialto" (a poetry magazine) looked very Flashy to me. Some magazines ("Tears in the Fence", for example) avoid genre classification by not labelling sections "Prose" and "Poetry". Sometimes (as in a few New Writing anthologies by the British Council) there's a section entitled "Texts" for debatable works.

The 2 Flash writers I've followed most closely (it's hard to avoid them if you read online) are Vanessa Gebbie and Tania Hershman. They both write poetry and short stories as well as Flash. Their Flash spans a spectrum. Pieces like Tania Hershman's "Hand" is where poetry takes over from Flash. The shortest piece in her The White Road and Other Stories book (Orange Prize Commended) is 102 words long. She's got Flash into the august "London Magazine", and in June 2010 BBC Radio 4 will present a week of her Flash. Vanessa Gebbie's contributed to "Field Guide to Flash Fiction" (Rose Metal Press), and has edited SHORT CIRCUIT - A Guide to the Art of the Short Story. Her Flash tends to be closer to prose, I think, which may be because she's more serious about her poetry (her work's been short-listed in the Bridport poetry competition).

Both are relatively new writers emerging without historical baggage into a world where Flash is a viable option and poetry isn't necessarily considered a higher form of art. It will be interesting to see how this new generation of writers redefines the genres.