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SFReader Forums > SFReader > Ask The Expert > Flash? Verse? Fiction?

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Hermit
Diavhrati Luminary

Date Joined May 2007
Total Posts : 1785

Posted 7/17/2007 11:00 AM (GMT -5)

As this discussion seemed to garner so much interest, I thought we'd toss it up here and start all over.

What separates flash fiction from poetry? How to tell the difference?

Exile of my own dull vice. . .

PaulMc
Adept

Date Joined May 2005
Total Posts : 992

Posted 7/17/2007 11:06 AM (GMT -5)

Bitter Hermit said...
As this discussion seemed to garner so much interest, I thought we'd toss it up here and start all over.

What separates flash fiction from poetry? How to tell the difference?

I think of flash as being a mini-story, therefore there should be a plot of some kind that gets executed. If the writing is more about capturing mood, emotions, etc, then it might be considered "pose poetry", whether it is "flash" or not.

That's just my take on it.

-- Paul McNamee

My Writings
The Tales of Doran Coyle

gwthomas21
Adept

Date Joined Sep 2004
Total Posts : 977

Posted 7/17/2007 11:42 AM (GMT -5)

For me the big difference aside from things like rhyme and meter is that a poem need not tell a story. A FLASH story must be a story.

GW

G. W. Thomas has appeared in over 350 different books, magazines and ezines including Writer's Digest, The Armchair Detective and Black October Magazine. He draws the web comic CHUCK THE PENGUIN. His website is www.gwthomas.org

erazmus
Master

Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4557

Posted 7/17/2007 11:45 AM (GMT -5)

Hell, no one knows that! They can't even decide what "Flash Fiction" is length wise. As compared to a drabble, say. I've seen flash fiction listed in guidelines as "under five hundred" words, under a thousand and othe lengths.

And I'd guess the difference between a flash story and say, a narrative poem would be in language choice. Choosing every word for effect is common to both, of course, but the choice you make and the esthetic underlying those choices seperate poems from flash, I think. Poems seem, to me, to have a richness of image, an almost aural impact that flash eschews. Instead flash seems to drive to a cut-away of all the excess and strip down to the essential story. A sort of Ray Chandler gone to horrible extremes, with lyric quality of the words, if even considered, a distant second in priority.

Mike

Michael D. Turner
"Psyched Up" in _Turn the other Chick_-ed. E. Friesner-Baen books
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"Dutchman Rescue"in Continuum SF #6
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crystalwizard
Forum Moderator

Date Joined Nov 2006
Total Posts : 5194

Posted 7/17/2007 12:18 PM (GMT -5)

I think of flash fiction as being something short enough to broadcast to someone's cellphone. Something you can read 'in a flash' and probably text message. Everyone's got their own idea of length, but that's my opinion, which is why my flash pieces tend to be about 150 words.

To me, poetry has to have rhyme and meter. Don't anyone flame me either, but I can't see any difference between free-form, non-rhyming poetry and other works of prose, with the exception that free-verse also seems to be allowed not to make sense. Throw a bunch of disjointed, rambling sentences together, tell everyone it's full of symbolism and is free-verse and you wind up with a popular bit of poetry (which to me isn't anything more than rambling, disjointed sentences).

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erazmus
Master

Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4557

Posted 7/18/2007 1:27 PM (GMT -5)

Yes, exactly. The first is some sort of poem because of how its arrainged, the second is flash. (I'm too tired to look up the details of sonnets.)
Mike

crystalwizard
Forum Moderator

Date Joined Nov 2006
Total Posts : 5194

Posted 7/18/2007 10:00 PM (GMT -5)

erazmus said...
Yes, exactly. The first is some sort of poem because of how its arrainged, the second is flash. (I'm too tired to look up the details of sonnets.)
Mike

And they're both over-written.

von Darkmoor
Small Press Publisher (and Dancer still)

Date Joined Dec 2005
Total Posts : 3120

Posted 7/20/2007 11:51 AM (GMT -5)

Howd'd sonnets get over here?

Arrgh, they're infesting the place now!

~~~~~~~~~~
Jason M. Waltz
Fantasy Acquisitions Editor Staffs & Starships Magazine
~~~~~~~~~~
Ever waltz with the Devil? Or devil with a Waltz? Visit von Darkmoor's thoughts to find out (and read a review or two).

R. L. Copple
Acolyte

Date Joined Mar 2007
Total Posts : 242

Posted 7/23/2007 8:32 PM (GMT -5)

Poetry can be hard to understand, I'll grant you that. Much tends to go over my head. But, there is also a lot of poetry that does make perfect sense, and it doesn't need to rhyme to be poetry. The key difference is there is a flow to good poetry, something I'm still working on. And, poetry can tell a story as well. The key difference is flow and imagery.

Flash, whatever size one puts on it, generally doesn't strive for a bunch of images and analogies, but works to tell a complete story in a few words. However, sometimes flash can be written very poetically, or a poem can be very prosy. Somewhere between those two, there is a gray area, of which I don't have a need to draw a firm line.

R. L. Copple

http://blog.copple.us
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