Flash fiction is fiction of extreme brevity. While there is no universally-accepted word limit, generally flash fiction is a short story of less than 2,000 words. Most flash-fiction pieces run between 250 and 1,000 words. By contrast, traditional short stories are... [more]
Flash fiction is fiction of extreme brevity. While there is no universally-accepted word limit, generally flash fiction is a short story of less than 2,000 words. Most flash-fiction pieces run between 250 and 1,000 words. By contrast, traditional short stories are often as long as 3,000 to 10,000 words and can have as many as 17,500 words before being considered novellas or novels. Flash fiction is, however, primarily defined by the intent that it be read at a single short sitting.
Other names for flash fiction include sudden fiction, microfiction, micro-story, postcard fiction, and short short story, though distinctions are sometimes drawn between some of these terms; for example, sometimes 1,000 words is considered the cut-off between "flash fiction" and the slightly longer "sudden fiction".
The term "flash fiction" likely originated in James Thomas', Denise Thomas', and Tom Hazuka's 1992 anthology of that title. As the editors said in their introduction, their definition of a "flash fiction" was a story that would fit on two facing pages of a typical digest-sized literary magazine, or about 750 words. [show less]