Pulp.net - Story.txt2

Most published short stories are upwards of 2,000 words long. Chekhov is widely credited as the master of the short story, but his stories seem surprisingly long to a modern reader, usually clocking in at over 10,000 words a tale. Since Chekhov’s day, story lengths have been shrinking, perhaps to fit shorter attention spans, perhaps to fit newly available means of delivery — by screen, blog, phone etc. Hanif Kureishi’s story ‘Weddings and Beheadings’, a runner-up in the 2007 National Short Story prize, weighed in at just 1007 words. And the 100-word story (sometimes referred to as a ‘drabble’) has been popular among science fiction writers since the 1980s.

There are a number of online outlets for very short fiction, referred to in order of decreasing size as flash fiction (c.1000 words), microfiction (usually 250 words or less) or nano-fiction (under 100 words — how short can you go?).

Ernest Hemingway is among the writers who have played around with reducing narrative to its limits. He wrote a six-word story, as follows: ‘For Sale: baby shoes, Never worn.’ Other six-word stories include William Gibson’s, published in Wired online: ‘Bush told the truth. Hell froze.’ And AL Kennedy’s, in The Guardian: ‘He didn’t. She did. Big mistake.’

Narrating a tale in six words is a tall order, but 100 words is a great length to work with; the success of Dan Rhodes’ Anthropology, which contains 101 x 101-word stories, testifies to the fact that it can be popular with readers as well as writers. Click here to read some sample 100-word stories by Rhodes and others...

by Lane Ashfeldt