The prose literary form probably best suited to our distracting lives, constantly bombarded with information as we are, “flash fiction” has come into style over the past few decades. Known broadly by the terms “flash fiction” and “short short story,” these stories have emerged in a number of distinct forms with the advent of internet competitions, including “55 Fiction” (exactly 55 words), the Drabble (exactly 100 words), and the “69er” (hopefully, you can guess how many words).
The form has no certain origin, although authors have played with extraordinarily short forms for a long time. Some consider Aesop’s Fables as one of the oldest examples of flash fiction. More recently, authors like Julio Cortazar, Joyce Carol Oates, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Jorge Luis Borges, and, according to legend, Ernest Hemingway have dabbled with extremely short fiction.
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| via timelesshemingway.com |
I say legend because the veracity of Hemingway’s story has never been determined. According to universal myth-busters Snopes.com, the truth of the tale is undetermined. The story has been circulated on the Internet for years now and, whether or not its source is actually Hemingway, it is perhaps the best example of extreme flash fiction out there:
For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.
(attributed to Ernest Hemingway)
This example, of course, is the far extreme. Less than six words would hardly tell the reader anything. In the work of an author like Borges, there are a number of very short pieces of fiction, though none of them approach Hemingway’s example in terms of brevity. An oft-cited story by Borges:
“On Exactitude in Science”
…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658
(from Borges’s Collected Fictions, p. 325)
Clearly, these two stories are very different. Hemingway, far more so than Borges, seems to revel in the brevity. Six words is not much. Borges, on the other hand, seems unconcerned with the length of his story. There is the sense that the success of his story does not depend on how short it is; it depends on the story itself.
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| via ebay.com |
Is one better than the other? (Yes. The Borges story.) With “On Exactitude,” Borges opens up a whole realm of speculation and thought (What do maps mean? How can precise can a map be before it sacrifices its utility? What happens when maps become “more real” than the territory they catalogue?). What does the Hemingway story do? Mostly, it tells us that it’s short. Yes, it’s also sad—tragic, even—but these traits are notable mostly in light of it being so brief.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the King’s counselor Polonius offers the wisdom “brevity is the soul of wit”—words that have since fallen into common usage. But is “wit” all we look for when we read stories? Should the whipcrack moment of oh! their baby has died! and subsequent sadness in Hemingway really be seen as equal with the consequential ponderings raised by Borges?
And I don’t mean to pose that as a rhetorical question. You already know my answer is in the negative. I’ll shortly show you why.
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Professional authors are not the only people who have participated in the enthusiasm surrounding flash fiction. There are hundreds of sites looking for flash fiction contributions from amateur authors. While these websites offering open arms to amateur work sound warm and fuzzy, there is often a tough truth to be learned; not everyone can write flash fiction.
What’s so funny about this is that everyone has always known that not all people can write. No one picks up a copy of The Sun Also Rises and claims they could knock something like that off in a few years, much less in a lifetime. Our notions about writing, however, tend to shift the lower we go in word count. Few people attempt to write novels or memoirs. Short stories, though, are within reach. Still, 3,000 or 4,000 words is a rather hefty number of words. What about a page or two? What about a couple of paragraphs? What about a sentence?
The following pieces of flash fiction are six-word stories (inspired by Hemingway’s exercise in ultimate concision). They are drawn from two sources: a pool of submissions from professional authors and the amateur six-word story site Smithmag.net. One story is written by author Margaret Atwood and another by comic book author Stan Lee. The other two are submissions to Smithmag. Can you tell which ones are which? (See end of post for answers.)*
1. Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
2. Couldn’t find needle. Burned down haystack.
3. Handcuffs found. Not police. So embarrassed.
4. Automobile warranty expires. So does engine.
I’m not suggesting that some readers won’t be able to tease out which one is Atwood’s (it is a little more elegant than the rest), but rather that you have to draw a line somewhere. At a certain point concision becomes the only thing in common between these stories. They all depend on a token of realization or irony and that’s it. They don’t go much further or expand on their ideas because there’s no room for that. Some readers may protest: “So what? I like these little stories! What’s the matter with them?”
One issue is that you have to find the good ones. And of course we must also find the good films and the good books and the good music. But this, I would contend, is a different can of worms. On most of these sites, there aren’t any filters. There’s some wheat hiding in there, but there’s also a whole lot of chaff. Let’s look at some of the chaff and how it got that way.
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A List of Problems in Stories on Onesentence.org:
1. Not Getting It
Some people don’t understand the genre. For a whole bunch of reasons I can’t bother to hypothesize, they think flash fiction or one-sentence stories is a matter of merely saying something interesting. (Their capacity on judging exactly what is interesting is a whole other matter.) Sometimes it seems that they think a “one-sentence story” literally means whatever sentence pops into their heads. Take the story “Jay” from the Onesentence archives:
Whenever I make a homemade pizza on a Saturday night I’m immediately brought back to my grandmother’s house circa 1978.
That’s the whole thing. It’s not a bad sentence (though it might stand some editing…“a Saturday nights”?), but it reads like the start of a longer story or a novel. It sets up a frame for the reader to travel back in time to whatever happened at this grandmother’s house in 1978.
Let’s return to Hemingway’s story. (It’s not a sentence, but it’s still shorter than “Jay.”) Hemingway tells us everything we need to know: someone’s baby died and now they’re moving on. Whether or not they’re being forced to move on or doing it of their own accord is a moot point. Hemingway doesn’t set us up for something that doesn’t happen. Of course we don’t find out if anyone buys the baby shoes, but the story isn’t concerned with the buyer. We’re invested with the seller.
“Jay” is confused because it wants us to be concerned with the man making pizza on Saturday nights, but pulls us away from him and back to this grandmother.
2. Confusion
A hallmark of these one-sentence story pages is that many of the stories are ambiguous or unclear—and no, these are not purposeful ambiguities. Let’s look at “Its Started” (lack of apostrophe is the original punctuation):
It only took one week of kindergarten for my 3-year-old to come home and tell me that he is going to stab me and kill me.
So there you are. Only I’m not sure why the child wants “to stab [his parent] and kill [him/her].” Is it because the child hates having been forced to attend school or because the child has been taught by the school to hate the parent? I’d buy the first explanation over the second one, but the second one cannot be adequately discredited.
You don’t like that example? You need more?
“Contaminated” - The day I got diagnosed with bipolar disorder was the day I chased my best friend down the street with a butterfly knife.
“AwkwardTruths” - Afterwards, I deeply regretted telling my hairdresser that my mother had had a nose job.
“Chad” - My father gave me a glass of milk to help swallow the pages as I was slowly force-fed the forbidden book he discovered hidden under my bed.
“Crystal” - Mom, I never told you what they did to me, because I was ashamed and I was afraid you would think it was my fault. (And she doesn’t tell the Internet either, apparently.)
“Billi” - There's not a day that goes by that I don't think about how things could've been between us if we hadn't gotten there too late.
The subset of the “Confusing” stories are those that don’t bother to clarify important points within the title or the text itself, but choose instead to reveal the subject of the story within the tags. See the post below.
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| via onesentence.org |
If the story is the sentence, then surely something is lost once the sentence becomes dependent on its immediate context on the website? You could not, for example, forward “Roller coasters are my biggest fear, which is ironic considering the nature of my disease” in an email without noting "bipolar" and expect your recipients to be moved by it.
3. The Pity Party
This is obvious. Too many (read most) of the stories on Onesentence.org are examples of individuals either broadcasting their suffering to the world or engaging in helpless schadenfreude. The website FMyLife.com (Fuck My Life) exemplifies this attitude; something terrible happens to you so you tell the Internet about it.
But it wouldn’t be fair to say that any story attempting to raise some pity is a bad story. Aristotle, in the eyes of many the father of literary theory, once stated that the purpose of tragedy is “an arousal of pity and fear.” I’m thinking that a careful line needs to be drawn, only I’m not quite sure how. A few that I think cross that not-quite-defined line:
“txmade” - The day after my failed suicide attempt, I was diagnosed with cancer.
“Lauren” - The 4am waitress at Shari's took better care of me during my overdose then my friends ever did the first time.
“buk” - By the time I worked up the courage to IM him and finally reveal my little crush, he had signed off.
(Draw a line here? There are others like the one below—in the vein of Hemingway’s story.)
“Lea” - This morning I went to the vet for the last time.
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Let’s return to a point I made earlier—before our wanderings through the chaff of Onesentence.org. Why exactly is Borges better than Hemingway?
For me, the answer lies in relative brevity. I mentioned before that there’s only so much six words can say. Can you imagine a five word story? Four? Three? A single word? At a certain point you can’t say anything at all. Borges is better simply because his story is not a flash in the pan. You read Hemingway’s story once and there it is—in all its luminosity—and it will never be any brighter than that. Borges only gets brighter the more you read. If I were you, I’d scroll up and read it again.
* 1. Margaret Atwood; 2. Smithmag.net; 3. Smithmag.net; 4. Stan Lee
See more:
Aristotle, Poetics.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. New York: Penguin, 1998.
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. New York: Penguin, 1998.
Shakespeare, Hamlet
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