How I Became A Flasher

By William I. Lengeman III

I have a talent for silence and brevity. I can keep silent when it seems best to do so, and when I speak I can, and do usually, quit when I am done. (Rutherford B. Hayes)

One of my earliest surviving bits of literary brilliance – and probably my first foray into flash fiction – was The Case Of The Missing Diamond . I wrote the play in fourth grade, and it was a masterpiece of brevity, if not necessarily of dramatic exposition. Within its forty-five lines, I somehow managed to pack a fully realized (well, sort of) three-act play.

I dabbled in writing a bit during my teens and then put it aside altogether. When I came back I was in my late twenties, when I took up the perilous pursuit of freelance journalism, focusing on non-fiction and eschewing fiction, for the most part.

It would be another decade before my slapdash attempts at fiction writing coalesced into anything even remotely worthwhile. I eventually found myself writing short stories – mostly uninspired ones – that more or less fell into the traditional short story lengths.

Depending on who you ask, the upper limit for a flash fiction story may be anywhere from one to two thousand words. I chose to set the bar considerably lower, selecting a somewhat arbitrary limit of five hundred words.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. For the longest time I was not even aware that there was such a thing as flash fiction. I'm sure I must have run across some short-shorts in my extensive readings, but they are generally the exception rather than the norm.

My first serious foray into flash fiction was inspired by L. Frank Baum, who is best known for his Oz books (as in, The Wizard Of…), but who also wrote a bunch of brief, fanciful tales, which were collected in American Fairy Tales . After reading four of these ( The Glass Dog, The Queen of Quok, The Magic Bonbons, The Dummy That Lived ) in David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer's anthology, Masterpieces Of Fantasy And Enchantment , I sought out Baum's book, eagerly devoured it and had a brainstorm. Alright, maybe it was just a brain squall, or even a brain drizzle.

I realized that a story could be very short and still retain all the essential characteristics of a story. Of course Baum's pieces were rather verbose compared to the some of the micro-fiction efforts in circulation today. Micro-fiction is generally considered to be a story of one hundred words or less. I refer you to two volumes of The World's Shortest Stories , by way of illustration of just how short a story can be and still be coherent.

Reading Baum's short-shorts inspired me to try my hand at the form, so I got right down to it and came up with The Magic Cellphone, a derivative and only marginally clever piece that ran about five hundred words. Another squall raged among my synapses and I conceived of making my tale exactly 499 words long, Why, you ask? Well, why ask why? You gotta have a gimmick, I guess.

I proceeded to write seven more fanciful tales, made a few halfhearted attempts to market them and then returned to the creation of “proper” stories. After winding up a yet to be published novel about a year later I was not keen to embark on any more lengthy projects. I remembered my earlier experiments with flash fiction and decided to revisit the form, throwing myself into it with much more vigor this time.

I've now amassed an archive of several hundred flash fiction tales ranging from 44 – 499 words long. Some are inspired and some are hopeless, but that's that appeal of writing flash fiction. If a piece turns out to be crap, you can toss it on the dung heap and move on. The nature of flash fiction lends itself more to experimentation than longer forms.

I've been writing a great deal of flash fiction lately, but I haven't completely turned my back on the long forms. My wife and I are currently wrapping up the first draft of a young adult horror novel and I'm messing around with some other “long” projects. But I've always tended to be an impatient sort and I find myself slipping away from these endless expanses of pages to dash off a quickie now and again.

Brevity, as Shakespeare claimed, may or may not be the soul of wit, but there is something eminently satisfying about sitting down and spewing forth a fully formed sliver of story in one sitting that just cant be beat.