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I’d like to share some thoughts on the impact the short short, the very short story, micro-fiction and sudden fiction are having on creative writing and American Literature.

We live in a world community.  For the skeptics of this fact the global recession must be a shock.  To the online writer the recession is more proof that all people on the planet are tightly connected.  The Internet is part of the glue that holds us together.

Short stories also hold us together.  Every society has short stories.  The problem is that as the world becomes more interconnected and the computer brings ever more people online the time we have for reading and writing fiction continues to shrink.

Short stories about family, relationships, men, women, love, romance, sex, religion, war and peace sustain us as humans.  Our ancestors wrote stories on the walls of the caves they lived in.  The stories recorded ancient life.  Modern humankind can still relate to those stories.

Short stories are still necessary to us today.  This is why flash fiction has spread over the Internet and will have an ever increasingly important impact on the literature of the world.  We still have stories to tell.  We have a lot less time in which to tell them and in which to read them.

As the world and time shrink, flash fiction will play its part in American Literature.

You will find some of the best short stories on the Internet, and tips and advice on how to write it, at the Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette. 

Just google it.