Dear Geist,

What is the difference between flash fiction and postcard stories?

Dear Barbara,

Here are seven of the many terms for very short stories, in descending order of recent search results: flash fiction (19,700,000 results), micro-fiction, nano-fiction, postcard fiction, short short stories, sudden fiction and immediate fiction (9,280 results). All have champions who differ on story length or who equivocate. The writer/editor James Thomas, responsible for about 10 books of very short fiction, once defined flash fiction as a story that would fit on two facing pages of a digest-sized magazine (font size unspecified).

Other forms do prescribe length: drabble (100 words), dribble (50 words), hint fiction (25 words), twitterature (140 characters), six-word stories, six-word memoirs, three-minute fiction and more.

takes the “postcard story”—so named because it fits on a postcard—two steps further by inviting poetry and non-fiction as well as fiction, hence “literary,” and by requiring that the piece be inspired by a postcard image, hence “literal.”

One more thing: writers of very short anything should note that terms like “flash fiction” and “sudden fiction” refer to the speed of reading it, not writing it. As Pascal wrote, “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”