David Galef on Keeping It Brief

If it sometimes feel like the internet has changed how we humans do everything… well that’s not much of a stretch. It certainly has changed how (and what) we read, and write, and publish. The rising popularity of “flash fiction” or the “short-short” (that is, stories under 1000 words) may be one effect. As author David Galef explains, “Flash (fiction) is the spirit of the early 21st century: a quick start and finish, a lot in a space the size of a screen, with a sense of immediacy that longer forms often lack.”
In “Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook,” Galef pinpoints, through example and commentary, how to use economy of words, omission and compression to make your writing more powerful in all of flash fiction’s various configurations, from the character sketch to fables, lists, and prose poems.
David Galef is the author of over a dozen books from a wide variety of genres including novels, short-story collections, poetry, children’s books, and literary criticism. He is the director of creative writing at Montclair State University in New Jersey and feels very fortunate to love his day job.