24 August 2020
Of all of the forms of fiction, "flash fiction," which is typically defined as being a story less than 1,000 words, is the only one described with a metaphor. As James Thomas, the editor of several seminal anthologies of flash fiction, tells the story, he was talking with his wife about what to call these short stories of under 1,000 words. He'd been calling them "blasters," but that moniker didn't ring with any poetic allure. Right at that moment, a bolt of lightning struck, and the dark night lit up with a flash. "Call them flash," his wife said. And the name of a genre was born.