Flash Fiction is a very short story. 300 words is considered by some to be the limit in this style of writing, but at The Glass Coin we accept stories as long as 1000 words.

Some may consider this penchant we all have for flash stories to be a product of our recent Internet, goldfish attention spans. And while it is true that the average online reader will more likely read something he doesn’t have to scroll down too far to read, it is also fact that this form of writing has been around as long as Aesop’s Fables, and is a style utilized by the likes of Ray Bradbury and Ernest Hemingway

Recently Twitter has spawned #vss and #twitfic – very short stories in 140 characters or less. We don’t restrict our contributors to such limits on word count, but consider a six-word flash fiction attributed to Hemingway:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

It is a complete story, containing all the elements of a story: protagonist, conflict and resolution. However, the characters and plot are implied rather than described. And it generates an emotional response.

That is what we’re looking for. 6 words or 1000, we want to feel something. We want to connect with the story and be moved.