13 Metaphors for Flash Fiction

There are many ways to describe these gems, these shards, these bonbons of stories.

Of all of the forms of fiction, “flash fiction” is the only one described with a metaphor.

As James Thomas, the editor of several seminal anthologies of flash fiction, tells the story, he was talking with his wife about what to call these short stories of under 1,000 words. He’d been calling them “blasters,” but that moniker didn’t ring with any poetic allure. Right at that moment, a bolt of lightning struck, and the dark night lit up with a flash. “Call them flash,” his wife said. And the name of a genre was born.

The irony is that flash, despite being the smallest of fictional forms, breeds sub-genres and an ever-flowing list of new names. Flash stories are often called miniatures, short shorts, or postcard stories. There is the drabble (stories that are exactly 100 words), micro-fiction (stories under 400 words), and hint fiction (stories under 25 words).

The great writer Yasunari Kawabata described his shorts as “palm-of-the hand” stories because they were so small they could fit in the palm of your hand. Others call them “smokelongs” because they last as long as it takes to smoke a cigarette.