What Is a Novella-in-Flash—And Why Should I Consider Writing One?
Author and poet Michael Loveday defines this hybrid form and offers examples of the novella-in-flash throughout history.
Think of the Manchester City football team under Pep Guardiola’s stewardship (or soccer team if you’re reading this from North America!). It exists as a fluidly integrated whole, and simultaneously as a dazzling display of individual elements. So it is with the novella-in-flash, that co-ordinated fusion of long-form fiction and flash fiction once described by Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney as a “constellation” of stars.
The novella-in-flash is usually understood as a short novel composed of individual yet linked flash fictions—each chapter fewer than 1,000 words long (generally agreed to be the maximum for an individual flash fiction). Many chapters in a novella-in-flash will be much shorter than that—often 500 words or less.
Hold On a Minute—What Is Flash Fiction?
Over the last 30 years, the label “flash fiction” has taken root as the most frequently used term for stories of under 1,000 words. It was coined by editors James Thomas, Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka for their ground-breaking 1992 Norton anthology Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories.
Some writers use the label “short-short stories” as a synonym/near-synonym. Despite the newness of the label “flash fiction” itself, narratives of under 1,000 words have existed for centuries, such as some of the ancient Chinese myths.
Don’t be fooled by the name: A good flash fiction deserves to be read with care, and bears repeat encounters. For me, one of the aims of flash fiction is to slow us down as we cherish powerful details.
So How Does a Novella-in-Flash Work?
The story arc for a novella-in-flash tends to be a collection of moments, rather than the continuous arc of a traditional novel or novella. It may cover a fair amount of territory and time in a small space. (The Bath Flash Fiction Award Novella-in-Flash Competition, for example, is open to manuscripts from 6,000 to 18,000 words—much less than the accepted length for a traditional novella. Longer novella-in-flash-style texts do exist though, and are sometimes called “novels-in-flash” or “flash novels”.)
But the form is defined by more than only word count. By being composed of individual flash fictions, the novella-in-flash leaves out the filler that a more continuous novel would have included.
The flash fictions gathered into a novella-in-flash must be more than a miscellany. They need a thread: a recurring character/characters; or common plot events; or a shared location that tethers the stories; or in rarer cases, some very focused theme or motif guiding every chapter (perhaps with some “scaffolding” or linking material in between, so the book coheres into a whole).
Classic examples of novellas-in-flash include Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha (1953), Evan S. Connell’s Mrs Bridge (1959) and Mr Bridge (1969), Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984), and more recently Charmaine Wilkerson’s How to Make a Window Snake (2017), Gillian Walker’s The World at the End of the Garden (2020), and David Swann’s Season of Bright Sorrow (2021).
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Although some novellas-in-flash use fragments, prose poetry, or even nonfiction material, the core DNA of the “classic-form” version arranges a sequence of individual short-short stories to suggest a bigger picture.
Key ingredients include: the likelihood that each chapter will have a title; a significant amount of blank space visible in the overall manuscript, so there’s a stop-start atmosphere of recurring silences; individual flash fiction chapters striving to be a world of their own without the help of other chapters; a character situation presented via a kaleidoscope of angles, through a kind of montage; and events unfolding in time, with some story progression before reaching the novella’s ending.
Is This Style of Writing New?
Books using the novella-in-flash form were published as long ago as the 1950s. And its hybrid form can be traced back to older influences: the story cycle; fragmented nonfiction (such as the 10th century The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon); the diary/notebook novel; the epistolary novel (such as Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782)); “collage”/“mosaic” novels like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) or John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy (1930/1932/1936); narrative prose poetry sequences; and continuous novels/novellas that use short chapters [such as Voltaire’s Candide, or Optimism (1759)].
One book that may have a reasonable claim to be the first proper novella-in-flash is Maud Martha (1953) by Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize. Its short, self-contained scenes were described at the time as “vignettes.” Were it published today, it would surely be hailed as an example of a novella-in-flash.
The term “novella-in-flash” itself seems to have taken hold after 2014, when Rose Metal Press published their anthology My Very End of the Universe: Five Novellas-in-Flash and a Study of the Form. Although editors Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney assessed various terms (including the “flash fiction novel,” the “novella-in-shorts,” the “vignette novel,” and the “flash novella”), eventually they settled upon the label “novella-in-flash.”
And the novella-in-flash is a form rather than a genre, a vessel into which any genre of writing can be poured—crime, fantasy, science fiction, horror, young adult, historical, romance, literary, etc.
Where Can I Find Some Novellas-in-Flash to Read?
Current publishers of novellas-in-flash and novels-in-flash can be divided into:
- Smaller, independent publishers (often flash fiction specialists), such as Ad Hoc Fiction, Rose Metal Press, V. Press, etc.
- Major publishers interested in innovative fiction, such as Faber & Faber, Granta, New York Review Books, Penguin Books, Picador, etc.
Over the decades, there have been hundreds of publications that could be categorized as novellas-in-flash, and dozens more are being published each year.
Why Should I Attempt to Write a Novella-in-Flash?
It offers a dual opportunity and challenge like no other in fiction: a grand canvas made of miniatures.
The novella-in-flash enables flash fiction writers to act like novelists and explore a rich, extended story-world in a compact way. Flash fiction readers can enjoy watching characters strive, struggle, and develop over time.
For writers of traditional fiction, the novella-in-flash offers a chance to try unconventional structures, and to practice wielding language with concision and intensity. When we fuse the novel with flash fiction, it absorbs the latter’s electricity and musicality.
What’s more, the novella-in-flash is a unique vehicle for depicting human experience. It brings the individual, illuminated moment more strongly into the foreground, cherishing fragments of emotional and sensory experience almost as if they were sacred.
For most of us these days, life isn’t joined up neatly; we navigate an entangled, varied, and disparate set of experiences. The novella-in-flash delivers not narrative so much as the suggestion of narrative—a collection of moments not flowingly linear, yet not entirely incoherent. Piecemeal, multiple, connected yet apart—the novella-in-flash speaks to our era in a way that the novel does not.
Michael Loveday is a fiction writer and poet, and has been an editor and tutor of creative writing for more than a decade. His publications are: the craft guide Unlocking the Novella-in-Flash: from Blank Page to Finished Manuscript (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2022); the hybrid novella-in-flash Three Men on the Edge (V. Press, 2018); the poetry chapbook He Said / She Said (HappenStance Press, 2001); and the collection of short-short stories Do What the Boss Says Stories of Family and Childhood (Bamboo Dart Press, November 2022). Michael lives in Bath, England. More information at michaelloveday.com.
