Last year I published an essay here at Flash Fiction Chronicles called “Hint Fiction: When Flash Fiction Becomes Just Too Flashy,” which was my take on short stories of extremely short lengths. As far as I knew, there was not an official label for stories these short, and so I (facetiously, I admit) said I wanted to coin a term and called them “Hint Fiction” because the reader is only given a hint of a larger, more complex story.

Before a year ago today, the term “hint fiction” did not exist. I know this because when I’d originally thought up the name, I did what any technologically savvy person does: I Googled it. Nothing came up, unlike today, where if you Google “hint fiction” you come up with more than 13,000 hits.

So I wrote the essay, hosted a contest, and then a book deal to edit an anthology of these extremely short stories was offered. Hint Fiction was featured on MSNBC, and after several months, we end up here in April again. The anthology is scheduled to be released in November. It will be interesting to see how readers respond to it. After all, there’s a school of thought that quickly dismisses these stories, so I’m already expecting a certain level of criticism. Hopefully though, the anthology will open some readers’ eyes to the possibility that yes, these tiny stories do hold substance.

I’ve received e-mails from writers telling me how much fun they have writing Hint Fiction. I’ve received e-mails from writers telling me how writing Hint Fiction has helped them become better writers through understanding word choice and developing self-editing skills — which, come to think of it, is quite ironic as one of the very first criticisms I’d heard was how Hint Fiction would “slowly pull the rug out from under their writing.”

Another criticism I’d heard was at such a short length anybody could be considered a writer. Um, okay, so what exactly is wrong with that? A person picks up a camera and snaps off a few shots — does that automatically make them a photographer? A person picks up a paintbrush and swipes a number of random lines on a canvas — does that automatically make them a painter?

Yes, anyone can write a story of 25 words or fewer, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be a good story, or even a half decent story. It’s the same way for any form of writing, be it from poems to short stories to even novels. What some people do get out of writing Hint Fiction is the simple sense of accomplishment. One writer e-mailed to tell me how she had never written a story before, but she tried her hand at Hint Fiction and enjoyed it, and so then she tried writing a longer length and enjoyed that, and so she tried an even longer length …

One of the most amusing criticisms was the commentary on the essay itself. One person actually e-mailed to berate me for stating that art is subjective (though, in the person’s defense, they idiotically did not know the difference between objective and subjective). I’ve always maintained that the essay was written with a rather sardonic undertone. It was never meant to be taken very seriously. Yes, I have always viewed Hemingway’s six-word story as a story, and it has always bugged me that some people refuse to see it as such, and that’s why I wrote the essay — but I never would have imagined the essay would have reached the amount of people it eventually did. Had I known that, I probably would have written it with a less sardonic tone and by doing so it probably wouldn’t have become as big as it did.

Finally, the most disturbing criticism is how Hint Fiction and other very very very short stories promote ADD (which is another amusing point: I have a dry, sarcastic sense of humor, so when I talked about Twitter and how I “wouldn’t be surprised if in the next year or two a new service is invented, a complete knock-off of Twitter, that displays updates of only 70-characters, because, let’s face it, 140-characters is just TOO MUCH,” I was being far from serious. Yet I saw more than one blogger make a stink about this, claiming how I believed readers nowadays have a hard time reading very long lengths of fiction because we’ve all become ADD-riddled).

Yes, people do have ADD nowadays, but that’s all thanks to television and movies and music videos. Any person with any sense can see the evolution of film and TV through the years — how scenes became shorter, how jump cuts began to increase, etc. And writers, just like any artist, were forced to adapt to these changes. Don’t blame James Patterson for his 100-plus chapter books; he simply capitalized on the fact it was what the average reader really wanted. Just like how other writers are now using Twitter as a new platform to tell stories and reach more readers.

Ultimately, Hint Fiction is an exercise in brevity, trying to affect the reader with as few words as possible. It is really nothing new — extremely short stories have been with us for a long time — but at least the term is new, and hopefully it will stay just as strong as the stories that, like Hemingway’s, have fascinated and challenged readers for decades.

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Robert Swartwood is the editor of Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer, which will be released this November by W. W. Norton & Company.