“Tell me a story, our reader says.”
From the INTRODUCTION to “Flash Fiction America: 73 Very Short Stories.”
Photo by Brandi Redd on Unsplash
“Tell me a story, our reader says. Make me laugh, make me cry, carry me away. Help me to imagine a more compelling world; help me to understand who I am and who these other people are and what we’re all doing here and why we’re doing it, and if you can do that with language that is fresh and provocative, with nouns that are precise and verbs that are muscular, and if your usage is prescriptively flawless or wonderfully flawed, and if you can make me sing to the music of your prose, if you can bring the news of your world to my world, if you can ‘tell it slant’ and keep it short, so much the better. Telling stories and reading them are how we make sense of the world, how we amend our bewilderment. This narrative impulse is as necessary for our survival as breathing.”
