The soul of wit

One year while I was in graduate school, I served as the literary editor for the campus student magazine. My job was to review student-submitted poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction and select the few best to publish. After several months of enduring vomit-inducing drivel, I tried to energize the campus literary talent by having a “flash fiction” contest. Flash fiction is a relatively recent term. For those not familiar, it refers to short stories that happen to be very short—usually less than 1,000 words, and often much shorter. I figured dangling a prize before the student body was the surest way to flush out any creative talent lurking about campus, and, even if most of the entries were terrible, I didn't have to read them for very long. It was a win-win situation.



If you've never read an example of flash fiction, you may be struggling to understand how anything that short qualifies as a story. And that's understandable. One has to read a few flash fiction stories to get a sense of how they work, but it's actually remarkable how a vivid scene can be conveyed in a very short space of words. In most cases, it's the brevity of the story that actually gives it an emotional punch.

One (possibly apocryphal) story about Ernest Hemingway held that he got into an argument with some dinner companions one night over how short a story could be and still be a story. Hemingway wagered them each a small sum that he could write a complete, meaningful story in less than ten words, and his challenge was immediately accepted. Hemingway scribbled for a moment on his napkin, then passed the napkin around the table. One by one, they read Hemingway's story. Then, without argument, they each opened their wallets to pay him.

The winner of my flash fiction contest wrote a very brief story of a young man applying for a job that he believed offered him the chance for world travel and fantastic experiences, only to find that the position he applied for had been filled. It worked perfectly as an instance of flash fiction, because the story encapsulated the central character's daydream of international adventure, while waiting to speak to the HR head, that began and ended (abruptly) in a matter of a few moments. It was probably the best piece I published during my time at the magazine. Not surprisingly, the writer of that piece has gone on to publish several other stories and at least one novella since.

Epic, 500-page novels may be suited for those like J.R.R. Tolkien who want to take readers on an extended tour of another world, but even the briefest of tales have their place and value. In fact, flash fiction may be a more accessible genre, but it's arguably harder to pull off. Not many people can say something that is both meaningful and concise. Hemingway, with his spartan sentences and efficient prose, is a good model for an economic writing, even if he never wrote much in what we'd today call flash fiction. Emulating him might serve me well, even helping me take my writing to a higher, more forceful level, free of excessively-long and occasionally run-on sentences, bogged down by aside after aside and unnecessary clauses, which dilute with Faulkner-esque verbosity the original point I was trying to make—which the reader has long since forgotten from where I left it at the beginning of the sentence.

The tale about Hemingway betting how brief he could write a story is likely an urban myth. Regardless, it is a perfect illustration that a story doesn't even need to fill a single page in order to engage the reader. As it is usually told, the story written on Hemingway's napkin was only six words long:

"For sale: baby shoes. Never worn."