Microfiction, compressed fiction, skinny-fiction, sudden fiction, nano-fiction, hint-fiction, drabbles and dribbles, minute-longs and… smoke-longs..
All names given to the short-short story. Short? Typically, we are talking under 1000 words in length. Yet the term that has really taken off this century is Flash Fiction.
There are now many international magazines publishing flash; New Zealand and Britain both now celebrate every year National Flash Fiction Day and the sixth flash fiction festival in Bath runs from this 12th of July.
Some say attention spans are not what they were. We scroll images and film and shuffle songs. Even cricket games can be over in 40 overs. So, could flash fiction be the written storytelling form of our time? Or is it yet another passing fad.
To discuss this Culture 101 were joined by a leading flash fiction advocate, researcher and writer from Canterbury Sandra Arnold.
Widely published with poetry, non fiction and novels as well, she is about to launch her eighth book Below Ground. which features 77 of her flash fiction stories
It launches with what is called an ‘Online Flash Bomb’ based in New York: New Zealand time, 13 July
Sandra Arnold Photo: supplied
Existing somewhere between the traditional short story and the prose poem, Flash Fiction is talked up as engaging the reader’s imagination through minimum information.
“Taking the narrative from one and the brevity from the other,” Calum Kerr, founding director of the UK National Flash Fiction Day.
Arnold notes the Oxford Dictionary definition as “fiction that is extremely brief, typically only a few hundred words or fewer in its entirety which relies on ambiguity to create engagement in the readers”.
Yet Arnold's favourite definition comes from fellow New Zealand writer Leanne Radojkovich, who told RNZ’s Lynn Freeman back in 2010 that Flash was “built with absences.”
Sandra began writing the stories for Below Ground during a writing residency at the Robert Lord Writers Cottage in Ōtepoti Dunedin in 2020. During this time two of the stories were nominated for Best MicroFiction and the Pushcart Prize in New York.
Sandra Arnold has a PhD in Creative Writing from Central Queensland University and her work has been widely anthologised in New Zealand. With poet David Howard she co-founded Takahe Literary Journal and was its fiction editor from 1989 to 1995.
