The long and the short of it all

I am watching with interest a trend developing in our monthly competitions, namely the move towards shorter fiction. Another one came in today, 602 perfectly formed words.

It’s a trend reflected across the writing world; we know all about flash fiction competitions, we run our own from time to time, but what is interesting is how more and more writers are entering stories of just a few hundred words into the Global Short Story Competition, which has an upper limit of 2,000 words.

It’s as if the writers are saying ‘you can write 2,000 words if you wish but I don’t really need that much.‘

So how do you get that approach right? Let us define the terms for a start. The standard, generally-accepted length of a flash fiction piece is 1000 words or even less. The term "flash fiction" may have originated from a 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.

At its heart lies the ability to strip a story down to its most important components, throwing out anything extraneous.

So first of all ask yourself: What is important about the story you wish to write? What do I actually need to say?
Here’s some useful tips:
* You only have room for one main character, two at the most - don’t get bogged with any more than that

* You only have room for a single plot. No sub plots here

* Get to the main conflict of the scene in the first sentence. Get the reader hooked from the off

* By all means describe people and places but not at the expense of your story

* Skip as much of the back-story as you can. This is not a novel.

* Eliminate all but the essential words.

John Dean