One of my favorite types of contemporary fiction is the flash, the short-short, or sudden fiction. I like this type of story for the lyrical way it is composed. I also like that the meaning is generally left for the reader to discern. One of my good friends—California writer Guy Biederman— is an expert practitioner in the genre. He chooses to call the very brief short story, “lowfat fiction.” Here is an example of lowfat composed by Guy.
Things You Do For A Free Lunch With Chub
– skip breakfast
– overlook Chub sending back his pancakes twice for being too dark
– ignore his opinions about where you should look for work
– eat slower than him
-ignore vibrating cell, even though you know it’s Shelley from Pilates and you can’t stop thinking about her
– pretend you don’t read the same newspaper cover to cover as Chub, including the article on Christian Bale that he’s misquoting
– smile tightly to keep from yawning
– laugh at jokes that aren’t funny about the waitress that dude here has no chance with
– summon a dental emergency and excuse yourself, following dessert.
Guy Biederman is a North Bay writer and teacher who lives in Sebastopol, California. His classes include Lowfat Fiction, The Writing Groove, Big Chunk, and Walk & Write, as well as daylong Saturday classes with Ken Rodgers two to three times a year. His most recently published lowfat piece, Gravity Hill, will appear in the next issue of Third Wednesday, an Ann Arbor, Michigan, literary publication.