971 MENU publishes stories of 971 words or fewer because we are interested in very short stories, but 971 is a purely arbitrary number. It is in the neighborhood of 1000, but it is not 1000 -- this distinguishes the magazine. Also, 971 MENU resembles a telephone number, and this constitutes a dash of character. There is no special reason why 971 was chosen instead of some other number -- it just was.
971 words is very short, and we are interested in very short stories because they don’t take long to read, but we don’t believe that the very short story is a distinct form. A very short story is a short story. Flash fiction and sudden fiction are catchy labels that came from the titles of anthologies of short fiction that happened to be very short. No fundamental changes occur, however, as a story’s length approaches zero -- there has never been a predetermined lower limit on the length of a short story. A story needs to be as long as it needs to be.
Rust Hills
begins Writing in General and the Short Story in
Particular by drawing a distinction between the story and the
sketch. A
successful short story, he says on his first page, will tell of
something that
happened to someone, and it will demonstrate a “more harmonious
relationship of
all its aspects than will any other literary art form, excepting
perhaps lyric
poetry.” This doesn’t seem very helpful at first, as Hills also admits,
but it
will do.
Something happening
to someone means that a
character in a story situation is not
static. In a story, changes are taking place, and at some point a
moment will
arise in which the implications of those changes for the characters
will infect
the reader. To be infected (or affected),
the reader must be made to worry about these particular characters. A
sketch
doesn’t worry the reader. A story does worry the reader.
Of course, a story cannot merely worry. It must also satisfy, in its total action as well as in its individual scenes and moments. The reader’s movement between worry and satisfaction experienced over the course of the entire story, in individual scenes, and in specific moments -- this movement is vibration. Well-played, vibrations harmonize. Well-played (successful) means that everything in the story contributes and nothing detracts from creating in the reader a single (harmonious) effect: a sinking heart or a soaring one, as I have heard it put.
This is probably about the shortest way to say it: worry the reader; satisfy the reader. The statement encapsulates a great deal of what I think Hills is saying. It is crucial to writing successful fiction, and none of it is any less true for very short stories (or flash fictions, or whatever we’re pleased to call them) than it is for longer stories. A story is a story is a story, and in the end, the terms swirling around very short stories mean nothing. We publish flash fiction, nanofiction, microfiction, 55 fiction, tiny fiction, two-minute stories, candy stories, palm-of-the-hand stories, sudden stories, zippy fiction, itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny fiction -- any kind of stories at all, and that’s really what we prefer to call them.
Our only
mission is to publish
good things. We publish very short stories, but like any successful
story, a
very short one invites re-reading. It delights the reader, and the
reader loves
it.
Gregory Napp,
Managing Editor
The views expressed here are not necessarily those of featured authors.
Likewise, any views expressed by featured authors do not necessarily
reflect
those of the editor(s).
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971 MENU