A Butterfly in a Jam Jar

It occurs to me that even though I’m a writing fish who (a) swims in the goldfish bowl of the shortest forms of fiction and (b) likes to waffle on about the ins and outs of writing craft, I’ve never actually written a craft article that brings those two things together and dedicates itself to defining the dark (and magical) art of flash fiction. That perhaps feels like a glaring omission. Or perhaps it’s a consequence of knowing that many people who read these articles are swimming in the same goldfish bowl. They already know what flash fiction is and they don’t need to waste ten minutes of their day reading through my thoughts.

But, while it’s true that I do spend a lot of time circling round that goldfish bowl, I also often leap into the adjoining pond of short stories and the sea of novels and the swirling whirlpool where the prose poets weave their words, so not everyone reading these articles will necessarily be as well-versed in what is and isn’t flash fiction. And even those who think you know might not (in fact, I’m guessing that you don’t) have the same way of thinking about it as I do.

Flash fiction as a word count

When defining flash fiction, most people start with word count. Flash fiction encompasses any story that comes in at less than a thousand words. Or perhaps it’s less than eight-hundred words, less than five-hundred words. The more words there are, the less flashy a fiction becomes? There’s a point (under three-hundred words) where it transforms into microfiction. At a longer length, it morphs into sudden fiction. These are nuances. They’re in the noise. The important thing, most people will say, is that flash is short. In “The Art of Brevity”,

Grant Faulkner

describes flash as “a tiny island” then as “an afternoon nap”, “the tip of a needle”, “a bonsai tree”, emphasis in all of those comparisons on the need to make it small.

Flash fiction as a moving form

If flash fiction is defined by word count, and only word count, then does every piece of creative writing under one thousand words earn that label? Well, no. Again, most people are quite clear on this. Flash fiction doesn’t just come down to length. It also comes down to movement. Something must change. There must be some sort of arc. A short piece of prose without that sense of movement is a vignette. More lyrical pieces without a sense of arc might be seen as a prose poem. Or maybe just a poem. But certainly, they aren’t flash - this is what most people say. In flash fiction, you need something to change.

Flash fiction as an opera cake

So, you’ve written a complete story in under one thousand words. Ta da! You must have flash. But (and this is where some people’s definitions of what constitutes flash will start to diverge) there’s still something you’re missing. Good flash fiction (the stuff that really resonates) is like an opera cake. It needs to have layers. Flash might be small but it aims to be mighty in that smallness. It aims to reel a reader in for multiple reads, giving up its secrets slowly, with new things to discover at each successive layer.

Flash fiction as a TARDIS

But what if your piece does have layers? Is it flash yet? For some people, you’ve ticked all their boxes. But for others, you also need to ensure that your piece is a TARDIS (which for those who aren’t well-versed in Doctor Who is a time machine which is bigger on the inside than it appears on the outside). In her essay, On Miniatures (Brevity), Lia Purpura writes:

“The miniature, a working, functioning complete world unto itself, is not merely a “small” or “brief” thing or a “shortened” form of something larger. Miniatures transcend their size, like small-but-vicious dogs; dense chunks of fudge, espresso, a drop of mercury, parasite. Miniatures do nothing less than alter our sense of, and relation to time and space.”

And this, for many people, is an essential component of flash. The piece itself is small but the world around it expands and expands.

Flash fiction as a drug

Some of you, at this point, will be starting to see the problem of trying to keep flash within its goldfish bowl. Or more precisely, you’re starting to see the problem of keeping the goldfish bowl around flash. How do we label the pieces that are short, shifting and layered but don’t have that TARDIS-like quality to them? With just four elements at play, there are so many combinations of SHORT-MOVEMENT-LAYERS-TARDIS, SHORT-NO-MOVEMENT-NO-LAYERS-TARDIS, LONG-MOVEMENT-LAYERS-NOT-TARDIS that my head feels like it’s about to explode. But hey, let’s add another element to the mix. Another way that Grant Faulkner describes flash is as a pill:

“Small and seemingly harmless, yet full of powerful substances that might heal, might kill­—or might just alter your senses.”

What I take from this is that flash fiction contains emotions that are much bigger, much rawer, much more distilled than the emotions we might find in other forms of writing.

Flash fiction as the woodwind section

And still, and still, I have yet more elements to add into this ever-expanding definition of what makes flash flash. The next thing that many people (including myself) would mention is tone. Flash fiction, they would say, has a certain tone to it; it has a certain quality that is both instantly recognisable but also impossible to define. There’s something lyrical about the tonal quality of flash even in pieces that skew towards the more realist or gritty side of the spectrum. Even in the humorous, flash has a certain tone. It’s repetition. It’s imagery. It’s rhythm and sound and sentence construction and voice. The tone of flash is both restrained and propulsive. And without the right tone, I would argue that even if a piece is under a thousand words, and has a sense of movement to it, and has layers and width and emotional impact, it still isn’t quite flash.

Flash fiction as a butterfly in a jam jar

But here comes the twist. While all of those things feed in to what many people would add to their definition of flash fiction, flash fiction is also a butterfly in a jam jar. It is restless to find a way out. Flash fiction isn’t new but it IS new all at the same time. It’s a form that is constantly reinventing itself. It’s a form that rewards innovation and risk. Yet, that push towards reinvention isn’t something that easily sits alongside definition. Butterflies tend to stop their fluttering pretty sharpish if you pin them onto a specimen board and brand them with a label.

Does that label enhance the butterfly? Do we find the butterfly any more compelling because we now know that it’s a mountain ringlet or a grizzled skipper? Or is the butterfly compelling just because it is? By trying to hem in our understanding of form to a limited number of things – flash fiction, vignette, prose poem, short story, short-short etc. – do we lose the possibility for experimentation that lies in between?

And are these things pinpoints in the universe of possibilities or are they larger clouds of swirling dust that spread outwards and overlap? Are the clouds two-dimensional or three-dimensional? Or maybe they’re seven-dimensional? Think of a universe where one axis is word count, one is narrative movement, one is depth, one is width, one is emotional impact, one is tone, and one is the level of risk; then consider each piece that has ever been written as a star within that universe. Some pieces are SHORT-MOVEMENT-LAYERS-TARDIS-DRUG-WOODWIND-BUTTERFLY and those pieces sit in the very centre of the flash-fiction galaxy. But pieces that are SHORT-NO-MOVEMENT-LAYERS-TARDIS-DRUG-PERCUSSION-GLOWWORM also, for me, fly through that same galaxy. For me, we can easily have a piece that unfolds over fifteen-hundred or two-thousand words that comes across as flash because it ticks all the other boxes even if it doesn’t tick the box of short word count. Equally, I’d suggest that not every piece of “flash” needs lots of layers. Sometimes, I don’t want an opera cake; I want a pancake (and because of my chronic health condition, I can’t have either!!) Sometimes, a “flash” is still a “flash” without those red-raw emotions of Grant Faulkner’s seemingly harmless pill.

So, maybe (having just spent the best part of fifteen hundred words doing the exact opposite!) we should put our need for labels to one side and simply let each piece of writing be whatever it needs to be. Whether we’re writing short or medium or long, gritty or lyrical or funny, deep and layered or puffy and light, let’s allow ourselves to simply swim about in this constellation of forms until we find the right combination of elements to do justice to our idea. Let’s allow those butterflies (or glow-worms, or bumblebees, or hummingbirds, or moths) to flutter free of their jam jars and consider how they might metamorphosise into something even more brilliant by the notion of being free.

Taking things further

Want to learn more about flash fiction? I’ve heard great things about the The Writers’ HQ Guide To Flash Fiction.

Want to read some brilliant flash? Why not sign up to my other Substack,

Mondettes

, where, every month, a different writer picks ten of their favourite flashes and explains why they like each of those pieces?

Recent publication

Chain of culpability (Tiny Molecules)

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