Blog Entry #19
Flash Fiction is a really short piece of fiction. It typically has a word limit, and that ranges from 300 to 1000 words. I believe that these are loose restrictions, however I may be wrong. I wasn’t really aware of this until I really began looking into this topic for my blog posts, but much of the short stories I read could be considered flash fiction. Upon further investigation I discovered a whole bunch of seriously short pieces of writing. One story known as a 69er is contains only 69 words. That’s pretty tough. No more, no less. Just 69 words to tell your story. This is pretty intense.
I almost wonder if one could actually portray the monomyth in that brief of a story. If so, would it even be any good? After reading through some of these on the internet, I have discovered that many times the author continues the story in another short piece perhaps showing different aspects, though the idea was the same. This seemed to be the idea with the flash fiction that we were given in class. The same story was being reflected differently, down to the presence of the white horses on the yard.
I really feel like that this style of writing is widely accessible by virtually anyone. It’s truly all embracing, and you read through them in seriously 10 to 15 minutes. It’s really that painless. I really like how quickly everything is dealt with, and more often than not these pieces (as far as I’ve seen) many things are left to the reader to interpret. I’ve always loved this lack of closure. I feel like would could all use a lack of closure, it’s much more to real life. So, for the sake of this theme I submit that a perfect poem for this idea is “I Sit And Look Out” by Walt Whitman. In this poem he discusses the terrible and horrible things that he sees as he’s sitting on a hill. However, nothing he mentions is concluded, nothing is done by the narrator of the poem. He remains sitting silent, and looking. It’s also very brief, and could even be considered flash fiction itself. The poem can be found at: http://quotations.about.com/cs/poemlyrics/a/I_Sit_And_Look_.htm
Poem #24: Haiku
Bitter motions start;
Flying by, knowing nothing
I am left alone.
