A new form of Writing

Minifiction is a new form of writing found under many names; flash fiction, sudden fiction, nanofiction, microfiction or the short short story, to mention just a few. All of these have one thing in common: their extreme brevity, minifiction´s defining characteristic.

Brevity in literature is, of course, not new. Just think of Aesop´s Fables as an example of how very short stories have been around for as long as people have told each other stories. So what, then, is different and new about minifiction?

Well, perhaps most importantly, unlike Aesop´s Fables, not all “minfictions” are stories. Many examples are closer to short parodies or quick descriptions, while others use allusion and intertextuality to tell a story without actually needing to “tell” the story.

This is also the reason why we use to the broader term “minifiction”, rather than the other names listed above. These tend to refer to narrative forms, thereby excluding some of the most impressive examples of short short fiction, examples that can´t really be called stories. Put another way, all “flash fiction” can be considered “minifiction”, but not all “minifiction” can be classed as “flash”.

For us, minifiction is something that developed over the twentieth century in Latin America. Growing slowly at first, some of that continent´s greatest writers dabbled in it on occasion: Borges, Cortázar and Monterroso all wrote some wonderful “minifiction”, although they probably didn´t think of it in those terms. In the century´s final decades, however, the form really began to take off, with literary magazines dedicated to it, writers publishing volumes of it, and academics studying it.

For some reason though, minifiction has not yet truly made the crossover into the English language. This is something that we aspire to change.