Flash Fiction

Flash fiction is a format of fiction. It basically means a short short story or even a hyper short piece of prose. The favorite among the very shortest (a horror story):

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door.

Here's another variation of The World's Shortest Horror Story:

He sat alone in the dark, afraid. Someone put matches in his hand.

These are extremes. Typically, the following sizes are used: microfiction (under 250 words); flash fiction (under 500 words) and short-short (under 1000 words).

It has the space of a joke or an anecdote. (An obvious under-theme resonance to the above would be “... Who's there?”)

But flash fiction is not a joke, it is arduous and high quality literature, which requires some skills to be developed.

In contrast to a poem, though rhyming is not required and the focus is on traditional prosaic attributes: theme, subjects, plot, conflict, suspense, response, even high concept.

See also

• Flash fiction, Wikipedia
• The Essentials of Micro-Fiction, Camille Renshaw
• SmokeLong Quarterly, a great flash fiction online magazine
  
• Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
• Abstract Prose, Time Magazine