Theater & Arts
A set word count is always a pain. Sticking to it is never easy, because you’re always either way over it or ridiculously under it.
The standard limit for short essays and articles is usually a 750-word minimum and a 1,000-word maximum. To illustrate, here’s a list of some things you can do with 750-1,000 words:
- Post a long Facebook rant about your current existential crisis.
- Livetweet the grueling ordeal of waiting for your McDo delivery to arrive.
- Cram the first half of your 15-page EN 12 paper.
- Write a short story that perfectly encapsulates the essence of the human experience.
Does that last one sound challenging? Well, for writers of flash fiction, 1,000 words are usually more than enough to do that and beyond. As conquerors of the dreaded word count, the limit provides authors with a welcome challenge: To make something that leaves a lasting impression in as little words as possible.
Flash fiction is a writing form that feeds on details by telling a story in less than 1,000 words. It goes by many names, some of which include microfiction, nanofiction and fast fiction. Brevity is valued above all else, and so practitioners prefer to skip the long introductions and go straight to the details. The art comes in the way these details are laid out to form a proper narrative in spite of the character restrictions.
Less is more
The form is so short, in fact, that Rofel Brion, an academic advisor at the Interdisciplinary Studies Department, likes to call it prose poetry. “I think it’s really very challenging to be able to tell a story in 500 words, and a complete one at that. It’s very challenging, and that’s what poets try to do, ‘di ba? In a few words, try to build a world.”
This generation—our generation—is one of consumers. We consume and consume, eager to absorb as much as we can in as little time as possible. In the digital age where “the shorter, the better” is the norm, people want to do everything but have less time to do anything.
In order to satiate this desire, people end up multitasking. We weave in and out of activities like reading a book (or two, or three), watching the latest Taylor Swift music video, writing an article or paper and (hopefully) still making sense of all of them.
The immediacy of flash fiction is what draws people to read and write it. Cathy Dario, a junior creative writing major, Heights Ateneo managing editor for Internal Affairs and occasional flash fiction writer, says it serves as a quick fix. “I think flash fiction also has the capacity to tell a story in a different way, which is something very innovative of writers, and I think that’s also what draws readers in. The approach is very montage-like, and very fast-paced. Whatever emotion [or] feeling that the text gives is really fast, and it fills you up quickly,” she adds.
Most recently, Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, a part-time lecturer at the Fine Arts Program, and Noelle de Jesus (AB IS ‘89) launched a flash fiction anthology entitled Fast Food Fiction Delivery: Short Stories to Go. The two co-edited the work, which is a follow-up to 2003’s Fast Food Fiction: Short Stories to Go. The new book features roughly 500-word short stories from 68 Filipino authors. A collection of close to 70 original bite-sized works of fiction, it is chock-full of ideas about human experience—firsts, lasts and everything in between.
Empty calories?
Months prior to the anthology’s release, an online call for submissions posted by Lacuesta sparked a debate between several established Filipino writers. One writer even compared the book to real fast food, saying that it would surely be full of “empty calories.”
Dean Alfar, speculative fiction writer and Palanca award-winner, banks on the challenge presented by the limited number of words. He says, “For me, I wouldn’t say that just because it’s short, it doesn’t mean that it’s terrible or that it doesn’t have the capacity. It’s apples and oranges. A novel has space to explore, but with short form, short story or flash fiction, the challenge is to be precise. To be able to say something in a brief amount of space and time and affect the reader–that’s the power there.”
Dario compares it to a montage, “It’s not really saying ‘Once upon a time, this and this happened.’ No. It’s about really putting together a series of images and descriptions that eventually form a story. It can tell a story through smell, sounds, images—and both the reader and the writer are able to put it together in a complete narrative.”
Medium and message
With page-long blog posts, 140-character restrictions and seven-second videos dominating much of the Internet, it’s clear that the entire media landscape is evolving at a rapid pace. We never really know what the next big thing might be. It’s natural, then, for contemporary writers to seek out forms more compatible to the times.
Though it has been around for a long time, flash fiction pieces have been making their rounds recently on the Internet. A big factor in the rise of flash fiction’s popularity is the medium which it is usually published through.
For WriterSkill, the home organization for creative writing majors of the Ateneo, the changing times meant utilizing new platforms for their members to get their work out. This year, it was TweetFic, an activity where the organization asked Twitter users to write stories given only a prompt and Twitter’s 140-character limit. The year before, they started posting works from their members on their Tumblr site with the hashtag #tumblrliterature.
All of this follows the trend around the world, where literature has been making a digital shift in the past few years. Twitter holds a five-day #TwitterFiction Festival every year, where a showcase of authors craft fiction via the social networking site.
The online platform serves mostly as a better means of exposure, according to Belle Mapa, WriterSkill vice president for Communications and a creative writing junior. “WriterSkill’s goal with TweetFic, Tumblr and even our chapbooks isn’t just accessibility to audiences, but also widening the range of possibilities for our members to get their works out there. We want to bring out people’s passions by bringing the platform to them. We want to help get them back in their writing groove,” she reasons.
“There’s this air of superiority or merit that surrounds the printed word over what is virtual. But that’s not to say that there are excellent pieces that are solely published online,” Mapa continues.
Above all else, what is the point of flash fiction? It isn’t in the form itself anymore, but in its simple goals, which are the same as any other kind of literature: The platform—in terms of accessibility—and the satisfaction it gives to its readers. It is bite-sized fiction that provides everything contemporary readers want in the time they want.
What else can you do with a 750- to 1000-word limit? Probably not write an analysis article on flash fiction, because I’m already way past mine. Word count is a pain.
Editor’s Note: Belle O. Mapa is a Vantage Magazine staffer.
