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As people’s attention spans get shorter and shorter, so does the fiction they read. With hand-held devices becoming more and more popular, it’s easier to enjoy shorter works on smaller screens. For example, cell phone novels (novels read on cell phone which are often written in short, terse sentences in the style of texting) are immensely popular in Japan.

But short-short fiction, often categorized as flash fiction, also meets the need for a quick, engaging read. Flash fiction is generally defined as fiction under 1,000 words, though it is at times limited to less than 500 words. Do not be fooled by the short word count, however. Trying to cram enough story to satisfy into fewer words can be a challenge.

Who was it who said “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter”? Flash fiction often takes more time to craft than longer stories. Authors focus on selecting the right words and editing out the words that aren’t pulling their own weights. Yes, that can mean that less happens in a flash fiction piece, but that doesn’t mean you’ll leave the story unsatisfied.

There are many examples of flash fiction magazines available for free online.

• Flash Me Magazine publishes stories up to 1,000 words four times a year (January 31, April 30, July 31, and October 31).
• Flash Fiction Online publishes stories between 500-1,000 words long each month.
• 365 Tomorrows publishes new science fiction stories daily, but note that their target word count is only 600 words.

All of these markets are accepting submissions.

A fellow graduate of Clarion West 1999, Trent Walters, turned me on to the Daily Cabal, a site which posts new flash fiction from noted genre authors every weekday. The type of cabal also changes daily. As I type, they are the l33t sp33k Cabal. I believe that the first time I checked them out, they were the Fortune Cookie Cabal.

Other sites and authors experiment with fiction shorter than 1,000 words. For example, Curtis Chen (who I know from Viable Paradise XII) posts his own new fiction weekly at 512 Words or Fewer. As the title suggests, all of his stories are 512 words or fewer. Literary magazines such as Quick Fiction only accept stories under 500 words.

If even 500 words is still too many, check out Twitter Fiction. This is different than other efforts to twitter a novel, line by line. (See Twitter Novels: Not Big Success Stories Yet for some examples.) Instead, twitter fiction involves writing an entire story in 140 characters, the character limit for one post on Twitter. Depending on the lengths of the words, these stories run about 25 to 30 words. This requires choosing words very, very carefully for maximum effect.

For readers, flash fiction can be the equivalent of a literary snack between meals or before bedtime. For writers, even if flash fiction isn’t quite your thing, it can still be a good writing exercise. It is much like writing poetry when it comes to the economy of words.

If I’d had time, I
Would have written a shorter
Blog post. No, really.