Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, pulp fiction publications like Weird Tales and Amazing Stories satisfied the public taste for lurid space opera, fantastic horror yarns, and wild adventure.

During that golden era, the short story or serialized novel sucked readers into buying a wide variety of hot rags and papers. Many of the most reknowned writers of modern science fiction, fantasy, and horror got their start writing for these very publications.

Today, these same authors, once mocked and scorned by the literati, are taught in college fiction classes and lauded in MFA programs. Classic covers and signed editions of Weird Tales and Amazing Stories have become hot collectibles. Lovecraftian fiction has spawned its own active sub-genre.

(Just as some people really wanna be Elvis, some cult writers now actively strive to be Howard.)

Pulp has gone mainstream—or at least gained a degree of respectability it was not accorded by its contemporaries.

Pulp fiction preceded and foreshadowed both comic books and genre sci fi, fantasy, and horror, but the form wasn’t really new, not even 100 years ago. During the last part of the 19th century Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Edgar Allan Poe all earned their living by selling exactly this kind of short tale to tabloid pulps and papers. The pay was never good (although Twain did very well, many writers of the era bemoaned the low pay and slow pay habits of pulp editors) but the important thing was that the public really read this stuff. It wasn’t just for show.

In fact, back then, the public couldn’t get enough of it.

Coventional wisdom has it that cinema, electronic media and video gaming technologies have pretty much killed off creative narrative forms like the short story, especially the short genre story. New authors are still emerging, sure, but in general, corporate publishing pours all its money into Stephen King and Dean Koontz, and academic publishing churns out writers whose names we can’t remember and keeps them in MFA programs until they can get jobs at McDonald’s and start their real lives.

In short, modern publishing has left us with very few authors who come anywhere near the stature of H.P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, Robert Block, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, or Ray Bradbury—all of whom came out of the creative flux of pulp fiction and early sci fi and horror journals.

If you want to write short stories today, go right ahead.

Just don’t expect anyone to read them or care.

This assesssment of modern publishing is more than just intellectual doomsaying and sniffing: The truth is that nobody really makes a living writing short stories anymore, and even novels can cost more to publish than they ever bring in.

If you do manage to get a short story published, you are as likely to be paid in copies and forgotten as you are to be read. Even Kurt Vonnegut admitted that he wrote during a very brief 20th century window when a writer could actually make a living seling short fiction, but that that window has long since slammed shut.

The modern mind is too ADHD, too self-absorbed, too multi-tasking and maddeningly shallow and nervous to manage the kind of sustained attention that even a short story requires—that is the obituary pronouncement. The written word is going the way of the dinosaur, and the written nerd-word, the sci fi minute, is hitting the tar pits first. The funeral will be held this Friday at Google Headquarters. Bring a Jello salad or lemon cupcakes. Commemorative donations should be made to You Tube or iPads For The Intellectually Impaired. (Itii?)

Or maybe not.

Weird Tales, meet your favorite, most energetic great-grandson, Weirdyear.

Short story, meet your sexy, sexy grand-niece, flash fiction.

What Is Flash Fiction?

Flash fiction is very, very short fiction. A flash fiction story is usually told in less than 1,000 words, but may be even shorter. Many flash fiction literary journals (like Weirdyear) and literary e-zines specify an ideal length of 500-800 words for a flash fiction piece. Many publish a flash fiction tale daily.

Flash fiction stories are very readable, very weird, and most important of all, don’t take long to finish.

Flash fiction purists are often much more stringent than this, and look for stories told well in 150 words or less. Almost all flash fiction publishers are impressed by a good story that is laid out in the fewest words possible, especially if they are really evocative, perfect words. Pen a 50 word perfect opus and people who cannot pay you will beat a path to your door.

Think Weird Tales or Amazing Stories reworked for a literary-minded (mostly) online readership and you’ll get a fairly good sense of what is going on with this rapidly evolving genre. Flash fiction is definitely a form in process with a strong experimental bent. Though it has identifiable literary roots and a few editorial requirements, this genre is all about breaking the rules and surprising the reader.

Flash fiction often incorporates elements of poetry but usually tells an identifiable story. Exceptions to this rule abound, but in MOST cases a flash fiction piece must have a plot, not just capture a moment or an emotion. The challenge of flash fiction is to be poetic and narrative at the same time. In that regard it moves beyond the space opera boy’s club of 50s genre sci fi, and makes room for the multiple perspectives and emotional relativism of women writers like Margaret Atwood and Anne Sexton.

A few flash facts about flash fiction:

• Tone matters. The weirder and more internally consistent the better. I have seen flash fiction pieces that aren’t all that plot driven but the narrative tone is so bizarre that the story clearly qualifies. Reading lots of examples is the most useful way to get a sense of what I’m talking about here.
• A good plot is not enough. A very short plot driven sci fi story might technically qualify as flash fiction, but most editors look for a twist, a slipstream element, or elegant, poetic language in addition to the story line. The best way to get a feel for any given publication is to read it frequently.
• Flash fiction draws on multiple modern literary traditions such as slipstream fiction, Lovecraftian fiction, and speculative fiction, and blurs the lines that separate sci fi from fantasy and academic from popular fiction. You can definitely write MFA flash fiction. But I’m personally most excited by flash fiction that tells a gripping story in an imaginative voice that is nevertheless accessible to ordinary people—not ‘dumbed down’ flash fiction so much as living literature (“It’s alive!”) that recreates the creative vibes of the Weird Tales pulp fiction era. 

A Closing Moment of Shameless Self-Promotion

But enough about all that, let’s talk about me for a change, shall we?

My flash fiction story Monkeys in Michigan will be featured on E.S. Wynn’s online flash fiction journal Weirdyear on April 30th, and in Weirdyear’s sister fantasy journal Yester Year Fiction on April 22. I also published a story a few years back in Square Lake entitled The Loosestrife Man that pretty much qualifies as flash fiction, though I’m not sure if anyone was calling it that at the time.

E. S. Wynn, editor of Weirdyear.comI confess I am excited and inspired by people who just get out and do things without asking if those things are practical, profitable, or even sane—who do them just because they love doing them. E.S. Wynn, the creative writing instructor/writer/editor from the west coast who created Weirdyear fits that bill, as does the very talented editor/site administrator of Eye on Life, Michelle PG Richardson, (no the PG does NOT stand for Pam Grundy, but hey! It’s not like that would be a BAD thing if it did!).

Life is short, and sometimes, asking permission just takes way too long.

I am excited by the recent popularity of flash fiction websites because I love to write and I love the realm of the imagination, but sadly, I see myself spending more and more time of late writing for corporate ‘content farms’ about where to buy Christain Louboutin knock-offs, how to compute the correct level of auto liability coverage for your household auto policy, and how to get mold off your bathroom tile grout—and less and less time writing stuff that makes me feel happy and alive and human.

I can’t really see the point in wasting money on yet another worthless master’s degree so other academics can tell me I put my commas in the wrong places (that’ll be 20 grand in tuition please and thank you, Pam), while my stories moulder in some dorky little literary rag named Blue Cucumbers or some such nonsense, unread. And yet I do NOT want to see the internet turn into this heavy turd laced with endless badly written content about toe fungus—the turd that killed literature and real writing as we once knew it.

So this flash fiction thing, it cheered me up. It really did. I have reordered my priorities to make room for what is real to me: Green people from outer space who want our wimmin.

And it feels good.

I love all things weird and wonderful. I adore H.P. Lovecraft stories, I only ever dress in colours out time or space (no blues, and reds wash out my complexion), and I’ve seen every monster movie and alien invasion flick ever made. Sometimes I think I am a really odd 14-year-old boy trapped in the body of a 57-year-old woman. I’m OK with that. But it does get a bit lonely in here sometimes.

The prospect of a living form of fiction that elevates wordcraft while still engaging a reader’s imagination, even in this internet age, is just enormously exciting to me. Nothing would make me happier than to see the internet equivalent of Weird Tales and Amazing Stories catch fire and inspire people who are busy playing WOW and texting ‘OMG ROTFL’ to put down their electronic devices and actually read and write and wonder.

It’s an inspiring possibility, but will it really come to pass?

Weirder things have happened.