Brevity The Art of Writing Very Short Fiction A guide to Writing Flash Fiction A short Short Short Primer A Flash Fiction Handbook by David Galef

It's not simple to writing and surely it's not simple to writing in a captivating way.

I have wagons of books of the most acclaimed American authors about the art of writing, thanks to my correspondent Maria, a wonderful soul.

Each of them provide the best for stimulate the creative process of writing.

In this latest book by Columbia University Press called Brevity The Art of Writing Very Short Fiction A guide to Writing Flash Fiction A short Short Short Primer A Flash Fiction Handbook by David Galef, it is taken in consideration the so-called very short fiction.

That fiction, flash fiction counts 500-1000 words, micro-fiction 250-500 words, but less as well.

Once when I was at the high school and we wrote a composition, my italian teacher was shocked by the essential and punctual brevity of my writing. "I am still impressed" he said me months later.

Sometimes brevity is the answer.

You must be concise but incisive in short fiction, you must extract the best of an anecdote, the best of a moment of a day, or a situation you want to treat.

You don't have the space and words of a tale, a novel, for reporting a fact.

You must be brief, staying in the piece and reporting with wit, humor, sadness, happiness, what you want to communicate to your audience.

As you will see in this book there is a hidden world behind short fiction.

Some examples?

Vignette is a writing-style. You must have the ability of "photographing" in words a situation, a problem, an encounter, searching for the detail that later you will "enlarge" for creating the main topic of your composition.

Letters another genre absolutely appreciated because like also diary entries, there is an universe that can be explored.

You must use your alter-ago, the existence of another person for imagining a detailed letter where to report intelligent observations following the guideline of a common letter.

Same will be for a diary entry.

When I go to the supermarket I always bring home when I find them the list of the shopping of other people found in the basket. They intrigue me and they permit me to penetrate in the existence of that people. You understand a lot from the shopping list of a person; these lists, start to speak of an universe to us unknown but that it can become familiar for the sensitivity of a writer and, let me add, extremely precious.

Fables are crucials for every kid and adults as well, because they speak to our soul, our most profound feelings.

Perfect Miniatures speak to you through suggestions more than anything else, and the compression of short fiction will be intense enough for leaving your reader without...breath!

Soliloquies, Rants, Riff, Themes, meet the most profound necessity of our soul; a vibrant externation of a problem, a necessity, an urgency, a past episode of your existence.

Twists will let you exercise in the art of surprising your readers turning a good character in a bad one or vice-versa, mutating a scene, a situation in its opposite.

After all, reality it is not the one you see in your everyday existence most of the times.

Think just a bit at this, and you will discover an universe and it will be simple to imagine other scenarios, more complicated and with unexpected conclusions.

The final chapter is dedicated to the Internet, although what I can wish for you is to being published by big realities as the ones mentioned by the author: The New Yorker and The Paris Review. It would mean you have something to tell, you are able to do that; there is solidity and reliability in that two companies for what I heard. It helps.

The author treats of course the arrival of the net and what it meant for magazines and newsmagazines.

A different fragmentation, the end of many realities and a mutation, often, pretty painful.

Every section analyzed reports various writing-examples and then some stimulating exercises for you!

Wonderful!

I love the cover.

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori