I spent some time today trying to bring my growing awareness of internet fiction into some kind of focus, and while doing so the phrase ‘flash fiction’ kept nagging at me like a forgotten errand. Later, in a moment of clarity I realized that I didn’t really have the slightest idea what flash fiction was, beyond being very short.
So I saddled up ol’ Metaphor (that’s the imaginary horse I just invented for this post) and rode over to the Wikipedia Saloon, (apparently this post is going to have a Western theme), and asked around. And here’s what I found:
Flash fiction is fiction of extreme brevity. There is no widely accepted definition of the length of the category.
So there you go: nobody knows what flash fiction is.
Yee hah!
— Mark Barrett
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