I recently came across an article talking about the differences between the various classifications of stories. The author briefly talks about those different types of fiction, and for the most part, these would be short stories, novellas, and novels. And indeed those were the only types I had really ever heard of. However before the author even mentioned short stories he talked about flash fiction. The term caught my eye, so I started digging into the term and not just taking this authors definition as gospel. As a result of that digging, I found out that flash fiction is a story that is roughly less than a thousand words.
Of course, as I saw that restriction for flash fiction, I thought that no one craft a story in no more than a thousand words, yet I was also intrigued by the idea of it. With the format in mind, I started looking for some examples of flash fiction. And as I read a few different examples of the format, I realized that the limit of a thousand words could result in a story just as satisfying as a novel. Just as long as the words are the right thousand words.
With that realization freshly in mind, I started thinking about what kind of story I could write as flash fiction. So I started looking through my various notebooks to see if there were any story ideas that I could use for the format. Unfortunately, all of the stories that I have lined up are scaled up to at least short story length. And frankly, I don’t think I could edit them down to flash fiction size and still maintain a solid storyline. Just as I was about to dismiss the format from my mind I saw a few entries in one of my notebooks that formed an important part of the backstory for a much larger tale. More importantly, it was a story arc that I had no intention of telling independently. So I started to think about how I would take this somewhat lengthy story and fit it into flash fiction sized bites.
However, I was frustrated, so I hopped up and turned on the television and started watching a show. And as I sat there watching the show, a connection lit up in my mind. I could tell this story arc as a collection of flash fiction, with each mini-tale telling its own complete story while at the same time laying the bricks for a much larger endeavor, ultimately composing a completed storyline. The writer inside of me jumped for joy, and I started thinking about how I would disseminate my flash stories, and I decided that I would publish each completed story as a blog post as I wrote them. Of course, I would tag them so someone could quickly find the complete tale to read or reread them as someone wants.
I am eagerly awaiting my first publication of flash fiction, and I hope that everyone who reads them will find each to be a fantastic story in its own right, as well as enjoying the greater storyline they help to create.