Why I Hate Flash Fiction

Flash fiction is a writer’s genre. Often shorter than a tweet, the whole genre is built on competitions and exercises for creative writers rather than keeping a reader in mind – when we consider where flash fiction comes from and what it gives us, is it time we stop engaging with this ridiculous form?

Nothing in flash fiction encourages you to read it. Whether you come to fiction for plot, character development, beautiful writing, or to escape into another world, flash fiction is too short to give you any satisfaction. The whole form is, by definition, pared-back, containing none of the fripperies that make a writer’s work theirs – Terry Pratchett’s footnotes, Hillary Mantel’s internal monologues, even Orwell’s sparse, journalistic allegories have no place in flash fiction. There are no distinguishing features in a flash piece, which means no room for personality. There is only room there for ideas. To my mind, this makes them unfinished, but also lazy: you have taken the easiest part of writing (the simple having of an idea) and what, to many, is the hardest part (the putting of pen to paper and putting your story out there) whilst missing the craft. What kind of writer are you? What does your reader take from the story? With a flash fiction, it is the reader’s imagination filling in the gaps rather than you, the writer, giving it to them; more than that, though, there is nothing for the reader to latch on to. Genres like fanfic and fan edits show the power that fiction can have on readers, but flash fiction deliberately and methodically strips away everything enjoyable from the story, regardless of what you’re seeking from it, and the reader has nothing to latch on to.

Hemingway famously set the challenge to beat his six-word story*. His ‘baby shoes’ story is a masterclass in brevity and as emotional as flash fiction can possibly get, but, unlike the competition between Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to use as few title cards as possible, it did not advance the art in other ways. Filmmaking still owes much to those early auteurs, because in using fewer words the pair found other vocabulary to articulate their ideas: physical expression, editing, and avant-gardism were all used to communicate with their audience. The language of cinema allows for this brevity by furnishing the writer, director, editor and actor with other tools of communication, and the audience with some matter to extrapolate meaning from – unlike flash fiction, which simply ceases to exist at the end of the word count. Both Chaplin and Keaton continued to work in sound films, and the vocabulary they developed pushing the boundaries in the silent era enabled them to advance as the form of movies did. Hemingway, in contrast, continued to write novels, the ‘baby shoes’ story becoming an anecdote from history.

These Hemingway-style stories do have utility as a tool for budding writers, demonstrating how few words that are required to get an idea across, and encouraging the budding writer to pare back their work until they are no longer reliant on their original style – but they should absolutely be left in the classroom. Like the sketches of a master artist, the skill of brevity is fundamental to crafting a story and may be employed as one aspect of a literary vocabulary in the toolkit of a trained writer; like the sketches, however, they are only interesting when seen alongside finished works. A good curator can bring a sketch to life, but there is no life inherent to the form. Flash fiction is a classroom tool, one which can improve the skills for longer-form writing, and perhaps interesting in the same way that a notebook filled with drafts is, but it is not a format we ought to be concentrating on for its own sake.

If flash fiction is all of this, then why are there so many competitions focussed on the genre? Why do so many writers focus on flash? Brutally – because it is easier. It is short, and so easier to read and sift through en masse than a conventional short story, and much less defined by personal tastes and trends than poetry. There are many, many aspiring writers in the world – flash fiction does not take long to write, and allows them to enter many competitions, answering each prompt afresh. The genre is an ouroboros, feeding itself with itself, finding entrants because of the low barrier to entry and finding judges and publishing spaces due to the comparatively little effort it takes. Whilst there are flash competitions with cash prizes, which publish, and which allow you access to editors, I do not see how winning these competitions will put you on a podium to anybody except other writers, and I do not see that it demonstrates your skill in other forms. I would argue that, although it might be a good classroom exercise, teaching you to write outside of your style or communicate effectively, flash fiction is not in and of itself a skill it is beneficial to cultivate, despite the opportunities it seemingly affords, since these opportunities are gilded trash, offering nothing beyond some small recognition in a closed circle.

Flash fiction might only be six words, it might be three hundred, but regardless of the limits imposed by the authority for this or that competition or exercise, the effect is the same: a piece of fiction, devoid of all the benefits that come from reading fiction. The only people who engage with flash fiction are writers. Let the genre become an exercise once again, and stop giving credence to those who feel that they can judge or exert merit based on a tool that doesn’t give anything to those who read it.

* This is apocryphal and results from an undocumented anecdote that Hemingway beat Arthur C Clarke in a challenge to write the shortest story.
To-Do:

• Learn how to curl my new haircut
• Find a restaurant to take my SO for their birthday next month
• Hoover the room upstairs

Today’s Culture:

• Wales. I love visiting my in-laws here, and my week has been full of barbeques and baths.
• Fluffy slippers. I keep a pair at my in-laws’ house and my feet are SO snug and SO soft!
• We Are Scientists’ new single. Yes, I have pre-ordered Huffy.