A Word about Flash Fiction by Governor's School Students

Flash Fiction—sometimes called Micro, Brief, or Sudden Fiction—is a relatively new form of short-short story, each piece only about 250-400 words. Though derided by some as a sign of dying literacy or the product of an overstimulated, media-stunned, zero-attention-span culture, Flash Fiction can actually be quite difficult, varied, and imaginative. As Mark Strand says, "It can do in a page what a novel does in two hundred. It covers years in less time, time in almost no time. It wants to deliver us to where we were before we began." And Joyce Carol Oates: "We who love prose fiction love these miniature tales both to read and to write because they are so finite, so highly compressed and highly charged." And John L'Heureux: "The short-short story is an exercise in virtuosity that tightens the circle of mystery surrounding what we know."

Because of obvious time contraints at Governor's School, the creative writing group could not produce fiction of any significant length. Flash Fiction, however, is very manageable, so most stories produced during our six weeks were in this genre. The results were often very good.

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