The Best of Brevity
(Disclaimer: this article covers “adult” flash fiction from a source that I myself have only scratched the surface of. I have not read every work on the site, but even simply within the ones I have read, there are extremely mature themes. In this article, I will only mention ones that are age-appropriate, so you can safely look them up.)
This is the most ironic article I shall ever write, not because of the style I employ, but the subject I cover. The Best of Brevity is an anthology of the most successful flash fiction (Often prose poetry) article website ever. As such, this article is essentially an ant complementing an elephant. But that does not detract from the points I am to make.
The first piece I would like to highlight shows the flexibility of the flash fiction format. So Little is a piece that is once sentence long, an expert extension of the phrase, She moved from the chair to the window. This is achieved through including a massive parenthetical statement. It is an excellent example of what an author can achieve with great effort.
Sunrise explores dementia, written from the perspective of a son about an aging grandmother. It speaks to the value of ignorance in emotional situations, but, more importantly, in my opinion, is this statement: “And because she can’t remember what she read yesterday, she’ll read the same passages again today. And tomorrow. That’s the silver lining. When the memory’s shot, every sentence is a first sentence. Cracking open a book–even one you’ve read 10 times–is a small sunrise. Every page is new and clean.”
Counting bats is a sonorous seesaw of counting. First, she counts up, talking about how each number of bats constitutes differing degrees of stress. For example, she calls three bats a vaguely threatening, almost-gang. Then, she counts backward. Four bats, three days in the village, two hours of sleeplessness, and one woman in one small country, one whole ocean away from one home that sits calm and safe and quiet at the bottom of one green, blessedly familiar hill. Then she asks what comes before one. She asks, “Where is the sky, that dark, dimpled ceiling of my world? Nowhere, I tell you. Nowhere comes before one.”
Now, I promised I would give more than a summary. The point I am trying to make is that, over time, flash fiction has shifted towards the emotional gut punch. I could only stomach five stories in Best Teen Writing of 2018. The only valued pieces from young writers were those pertaining to violence, the sensual, or unredeemable suicide. The difference between the adult writers of twenty years ago and the teens of today is disheartening. True art is what it is without context, and too many modern pieces rely on current widespread ideas, which are unsettling as a result of being at the forefront of society. Brevity is a subversion of society, and it managed to use language in a self-substantiating way.
The Chase Verdict: When you read a book, look at individual sentences. The faithfulness of the author's control is a better indicator of passionate work than overwrought emotion. I only recommend Brevity to people who struggle with the exercise of varying sentence structure (Because of the mature themes of passages not referenced in this article), but in that case, flash fiction like it is a great temporal investment.