Flash fiction is a literary genre where less is more. Novelists Ernest Hemingway and Franz Kafka may not have used the term, but have engaged with such forms of prose in their short story collections. Meanwhile, American author Lydia Davis has famously written several single-sentence stories, her shortest comprising four words. This weekend, Mumbai-born writer and poet Aekta Khubchandani plans to conduct an online workshop on fragmented flash fiction, in association with the creative writing outlet Usawa Literary Review. The session is titled Snackables, and aims to give writers an opportunity to explore short pieces of fiction in under 1000 words. “Flash fiction is like a snack — quick, delicious, and at times, it leaves one wanting more,” Khubchandani tells us.

Imagination and memory feed off each other to make this form happen, she elaborates. “The making of a fictional story, especially a fragmented one, is about placing (i.e. structuring) the incomplete puzzle pieces of your story in a way that it makes the reader feel it intensively. The universe of the story can be expansive and immersive. This means we can talk about giraffe hearts, cancer, basketball, and a crochet dress together in the same story with ease and grace.”

Aekta Khubchandani