Journal Article

Flash

Fuss, Diana

2019

Overview

Minis, which I define here as single-page stories no matter their word count, make it even simpler still, requiring no disturbance to a reader's visual field at all, only an instant impression of a self-contained tale—a story in a box.1 There are perhaps better ways than word counts or page restrictions to distinguish flash from its elfin offspring, the mini. In the final three seconds, he saw himself blue, then pink at his mommy's breast; crawling in diapers, hugging his sister, playing, laughing, throwing a tantrum, going to school, fighting, swearing at mother, crying at father's funeral, graduating, working, marrying, stealing, being fired, divorced, drinking too much, driving too fast, slamming into the oncoming truck.10 Doug Long's \"Fast Forward\" takes a cliché, the belief that at the moment of death our life flashes before our eyes, and literalizes it. Much can be said, no doubt, for reading very short stories as a symptom of our culture's attention deficit disorder. Both authors assume the guise of a recipe to describe their writing process, at once satirizing the formulaic nature of minis while simultaneously offering useful tips on how to write them. 5.

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Subject: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder / Fairy tales / Fiction / Flash fiction / Genre / Literary history / Plot (Narrative) / Reading / Writers / Writing processes