Allow me to introduce my second child: Shorter Stories.
It is a collection of flash fiction that I wrote last year. I also wrote another flash fiction anthology called Strings Attached (2020).
Okay, so, the first time I had my eyes on flash fiction was in 2013. I was planning to join a flash fiction competition without knowing what it was and how it looked like. As I read the guideline, there was an example of flash fiction. It consisted of just six words. Despite the shortness, those six words changed the way I see stories. The six words were:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
I cried, literally. For me, that story is very sad. Devastating even. I am fully aware there’s a lot of interpretations about this story, but my interpretation was this:
It’s a story written by a(n almost) father. He has prepared for his first new born. He already bought baby shoes for the new born, yet the birth was a tragedy. The new born didn’t get to live and he didn’t want his wife to remember this tragedy. Thus, he wanted to sell the shoes.
Ever since I shook hands with flash fiction, I wanted to write shorter stories that have a wide universe with multiple interpretations. Somehow, this desire was supported by technology. People started to have shorter attention span. People — including me — made up excuses about time. We keep saying there’s no time to read while we actually have. We just don’t read long things. So I started to write one-liners on my Instagram stories until I realize it starts to become stacks of stocks. A collection of opportunities.
Long story short, I curated the one-liners and sent them to my editor. We processed the collection back and forth and the rest is history. Before the public release of Shorter Stories, I handed out the final manuscript to some friends and mentors. They got back with their take and one of them was:
“Shorter Stories offers glimpses of larger stories, welcoming its readers to reflect on their own lives and find their own version to follow”
- Rain Chudori, author of Monsoon Tiger and Imaginary City
While writing Shorter Stories, I didn’t have the intention to explore each of the potential leads. However, reading her take on Shorter Stories gives me an idea. I have 100+ one-liners that can be bricks to build a bigger narrative. Thus, here I am writing an introduction about my attempt to prolong the shelf life of Shorter Stories.
