On Short Shorts

Ben (my esteemed co-editor for fiction) and I get a lot of shorter stories.  Anything below 10-12 pages counts as short to us.  Around here, we call them short-shorts or flash fiction.  When I hold those very thin envelopes, I have a moment of both dread and anticipation.  The Greensboro Review does not traditionally publish very short pieces, but it’s a new year with new editors and newness is the name of the game.   The problem with finding the right ones to publish, however, is that there’s only so much room in each issue and we, of course, want the very best selection for readers.  Short-shorts are facing stiff competition from longer stories that have the luxury of time and space to emotionally devastate and delight the reader.   This is not unlike the impact difference between short stories and novels.

Length alone doesn’t accomplish that perfect mix of intrigue, truth, and emotion, but it certainly gives the writer more flexibility.  Our most frequent reaction to the reasonably well-written short-short is, “But I wish there was more.”  More story, more emotion, more meaning, more impact.  More of everything.  A short-short faces the risk of seeming incomplete and anemic—as if it were a rough outline of a longer and better story.  Sometimes we get this sense because the story moves to emotional high points so fast that it reads as overblown.  Other times the story’s dearth of emotion makes it more of an anecdote and leaves little impression.

Short-shorts are not easier versions of short stories (a mistake I used to make when daunted by the empty page).  As John L’Heureux puts it, “The short-short story is an exercise in virtuosity that tightens the circle of mystery surrounding what we know.”  This was on the back cover of Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories.  I love the way he says this though I probably don’t understand it in full.  The first part, the idea of the short-short as a virtuoso’s playground, however, rings absolutely true.  Any misstep in a short-short is amplified just because there’s not much around it.  One false line of dialogue is ignorable in a longer piece, forgettable in a novel, but blaring and horrible in anything very short.  In this way, short-shorts are closer to poetry than not.  Everything counts.  And then, for The Greensboro Review, it has to be just as good as any of the longer short stories.  So standards are high.  They might even be ridiculous.

Now that I’ve terrified or angered anyone who writes very short pieces, some hope:  I’m just one person with my own biases.  It’s possible that I’m flat out wrong.  Here are three examples of shorter pieces I admire:

• “Fallen Nellie” by Brad Watson.  Appears in Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives: Stories.  (Preview in Google Books.)
•  “Day Ah Dallas Mare Toes” by Luna Calderon.  Appears in Sudden Fiction Latino.  (Preview in Google Books.)
•  “Sunday in the Park” by Bel Kaufman.  Appears in Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories.

What short-shorts have you enjoyed recently?