THE ANGRY COLUMN – NOVEMBER 2007

By Adrian Fry

Flash Harried

You know the story. Your five thousand word, carefully constructed character driven science fantasy horror proto-novelette has just been published in the inky pages of Squillion, a magazine sufficiently committed to the sincere promotion of its cause that – like the video directors of Al-Qaeda – it doesn’t need to bother with production values.

You’ve created a world and sent it out into another. And since no-one is going to pay you and you’ve been at this racket long enough not to expect publishers to headhunt you to be the next but one Peter F Hamilton, you console yourself that somewhere out there your story will connect. You imagine some Californian horrorologist nodding almost conspiratorially over your carefully buried Lord Dunsany allusions, or some near anorexic girl in your very own town emoting with private intensity over your sensitive depiction of Zyilsha the Slave Girl.

You’ve read your story through several times – mentally correcting the grammatical errors which surely have to have been the Editor’s – without once straying to the little item at the bottom of its closing page. Where once there might have been an arrogantly self-deprecating author biography, an unfunnily defensive cartoon about Battlestar Galactica fandom or an at least tangentially relevant illustration, there now sits a gobbet of flash fiction. Yes, the flavour of your complex, circumlocutive tale doesn’t get a chance to linger in the mind of the reader because someone has perpetrated yet another spin on that tale in which the alien turns out to be the chair the thing they thought was the alien was sitting on. Neat, huh?

Once upon a time – when there weren’t many of them and they were little more than a parlour game for established science fiction writers – flash fictions were called short short stories. With their word counts in the very low hundreds or less, these little tales with a sting were as welcome in an anthology or magazine as a wafer thin mint after a Tudor banquet. They cleansed the literary palate and re-energised readers exhausted by the instruction manual quality of hard science fiction or the interminable atmosphere beloved of Lovecraftian acolytes. Some even had that rare quality of chewy pithiness usually only found in philosophical or scientific thought experiments.

Now, flash fiction is everywhere. On websites, in magazines, even (probably) on tube trains, flash fictions proliferate seductively across the literary landscape. The irritating thing about them is the way they appeal to our shortened attention spans, promising to deliver a whole story in the time and at a word count in which Henry James couldn’t have properly begun a sentence. As a reader, I find I can’t remember any particular flash fiction; trying to single one out is like trying to isolate the pleasure taken in a single boiled sweet when looking back over a lifetime of overindulgence. As with everything else in cultural life, the idea of the things is great, the reality dispiritingly anticlimactic. Just as television advertising was a novelty at its inception, so flash fiction seemed like something new and invigorating on the scene when it first boomed in the mid 1990s. Now, I simply regard flash fictions as a sort of literary clutter to be glanced at and dismissed as summarily as an item of junk mail.

If they’re appealing but not satisfying to the reader, what is their appeal to the Editor? I imagine he (or almost never, she) has to be a fanatical environmentalist. There’s not a lot of rainforest left, even web pages have to denude Nature somehow and readers want value for money even when grazing free webzines. Being easy to read, the Editor can get through several piles of unsolicited Roald Dahl knock-offs in the time it takes a print magazine to fold.

And what’s in it for the writer? Well, you know all those aborted stories and half-cock ideas you laboured over and then abandoned because even you knew they weren’t good enough? Dust them down, tidy them up and you have a readymade portfolio of flash fiction. Of course, flash fiction is never going to make your name, but it might just make your name ubiquitous while you wait for inspiration to strike again.

Go here to explain to Adrian why size really doesn’t matter, or to agree with him in one thousand words or more.