Also known as sudden fiction, micro fiction, furious fiction, short-shorts and postcard stories, flash fiction  suggests a burst of light, illumination, awareness, epiphany.  It's usually 500 words or less, but may be as short as one sentence.  Flash Fiction encompasses a wide range of genres, from mainstream to fantasy.  It's been around since antiquity (eg. Aesop's Fables, Ovid's Metamorphoses), and is growing in popularity, especially on the Internet, perhaps because no one likes to sit in front of a computer screen reading page after page of a long story.  It's an excellent way to write every day, especially if you're pressed for time, and flash fiction  can be expanded to longer stories or even novels. 

You can read flash fiction in a single reading, and you'll notice how everything in the story, including the title, brings out a single, preconceived effect (Poe's single effect theory.)  It's also limited in time and space, focuses on smaller ideas in larger ones, favors dialogue and action over exposition, plays against reader expectations, offers a brief glimpse of the truth and often ends with a twist, like the punch line of a joke. 

The most obvious similarity between flash fiction and haiku, tanka and haibun is brevity.  Both flash fiction and haibun are prose forms, although haibun may not tell a complete story.  Haiku and tanka, despite their status as poetry,  share some characteristics with flash fiction.  In all three forms, every word is essential and "sweats" to finish the poem or tell the story.  The focus is on one or two images or ideas that reveal the universal in the particular, resulting in an "aha!" moment of awareness. A haiku (or tanka)  is often considered to be poetry in its purest, most concentrated form, while flash fiction is a story in its purest, most concentrated form. 

I find writing flash fiction and haiku equally challenging and satisfying, particularly because the stories I write are exactly 55 words long,  just as the standard length of a haiku is 17 syllables.   The story posted on this page won first place in a 55 word crime story contest sponsored by Suite.101.com in October 2002.  Also posted here is a one sentence story (minus a title) that won a dishonorable mention in the 2003 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for the worst first sentence in a fake novel:

The Storyteller

The tiny, frail woman in the nursing home told everyone that she'd killed her husband and buried him their yard.  Finally, the police investigated and found two skeletons where she told them to dig.

"Oh dear," she chuckled when confronted.  "I forgot about my neighbor who saw what I did and tried to blackmail me."

Our story begins, as very few do, in the small but diabolically clever town of Torrington, Alberta, where the Gopher Hole Museum, displaying 71 adorable yet eerie stuffed gophers dressed up to resemble the townspeople, has attracted so many tourists that when a Torrington home goes on the market, it sells in less than six years.