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brevity is better. Extraneous details can distract from the unfolding drama. Any details included
in a flash fiction piece are intentional. They do not function to pad the piece; they have a
purpose.

Within the flash fiction genre, there is a subgenre: microfiction. William Nelles believes
there are six different hallmarks of microfiction: extreme situations and responses, non-descript
adult characters, a brief timeline from the beginning of the story to the end, ideas and references
that exist outside the story, and a decisive end that sometimes has a shocking or ironic quality.
The maximum number of words is usually 300 (91-96). All of the qualities listed are necessary
to have a truly short story. For example, if the microfiction story is about two small children
playing with a ball, then the author might intend the words he used to describe each child to also
reflect something deeper about their simple action. The word limit would guide description
length and what kind of ending the story might have.

One unexpected quality in nearly all microfiction stories is the absence of information.
Dan Irving addresses these absences in his article, “Storytelling in Miniature: Microfiction and
Reader Participation”. Irving shares Isner’s “theory of gaps,” which essentially says the missing
pieces of information in a microfiction story are really an opportunity to search for meaning. He
argues that “microfiction, while exceptionally short, is no less rich with gappiness and thus calls
for a high degree of reader participation despite its relative lack of textual girth” (9). In a
microfiction story, the presence and absence of information has meaning. Later on, he mentions
that these gaps give another interesting opportunity. He says, “Here, readers are not only filling
in the gaps from the collective frustration expressed throughout the work at hand but also
personal experiences of failure, especially failure for seemingly inconsequential reason” (5). In a

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