Flash of Light

New York Daily Photo started originally as a photoblog, a publishing format where postings are driven by photos rather than text. In time, however, with an interest in research, small descriptions grew to longer articles. With an interest in giving subjects a less clinical and more personal view, I have drawn from anecdotes in my life and the writing in many postings may be better described as stories and are more about the about the story than the photo. Now there is an expectation, both on your part and subsequently on mine, of writing.
I have come to really enjoy the writing of this blog and recently, in reading about writing short works, I came across an entire genre of fiction I was completely unaware of - flash fiction aka sudden fiction, microfiction, nanofiction, micro-story, postcard fiction, and short short story. There are even types of fiction which use exact word counts: 55 Fiction (55 words), the Drabble (100 words), the Drouble (double Drabble or 200 words) and the 69er (as the name suggests). There is no better time for flash fiction with the growth of visual media, competition for everyone's time, sound bites and the decline of book reading.
The bane of nearly every student of English in High School was the dreaded writing assignment where there was a word length requirement. For me, being somewhat verbose, these assignments were not quite as painful, but there still was always the concern that I would not have enough truly meaningful things to say. Certainly there is value in exposition and learning articulation skills, but there also is much to be said for one's words sparingly and not padding the writing. I am sure flash fiction would have been heartily welcomed in my English classes.
Flash fiction is, of course, not without its critics. In the same way that assignments with minimum word lengths may encourage verbosity, some feel that flash fiction with maximum or exact word lengths is no better, artificially pare a story down, where perhaps a few more words may have improved the story. I think there is value, at the very least, to use flash fiction as a writing exercise.
I hope you enjoyed today's unnecessary digression because after all, not only is brevity the soul of wit, but this picture should be able to speak for itself and be worth at least four hundred and one words :)

PHOTO NOTE: I witnessed this dramatic pink and blue sky framing the
Washington Square Park arch on Wednesday evening, March 11, 2009, at 6 PM.