![]() ![]() ![]() Stripping an entire lifetime down to a few details - this is a skill which entire books could be written about. It’s the ability to choose from all the spectrum of the character’s activities and surroundings: the ones that tell us most about the character’s set of circumstances. It’s an art in itself choosing those very words that tell us more about the character’s situation, about his or her personality, while giving us a feel of the atmosphere of the era (this is especially important in the case of historical fiction), or just placing us in time. There’s also another aspect of time in flash fiction to consider: because of the low word count, there are only so many words than can be used in order to establish a timeline. It is no small feat, and the result of this kind of compression can have a staggering effect on the reader. They illustrate the various techniques that can be employed to make time dilate in flash fiction - or rather contract to a few dozens or hundred words. It can encompass hours, days, months, a lifetime or even more, as we’ll see in the examples listed below. ![]() Flash fiction can stretch far beyond the few pages (or the fraction of a page) it occupies. But this doesn’t mean that flash fiction has to limit its temporal reach to a short span of time. ![]() Flash fiction is an exercise in brevity: this is nothing new. ![]()
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