Brevity is concise and exact use of words. According to a proverb, brevity is the soul of wit. Flash fiction should be a thousand words or less. An extreme version is the six word story, of which the best example I know is:
For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.
It has been attributed to Ernest Hemingway, but this is far from certain. Hemingway or not, the author was a genius.
Rudyard Kipling wrote a short poem in Epitaphs of the War.
If any question why we died, tell them because our fathers lied.
It is particularly poignant when you know the efforts Kipling went to in order to get his only son, John, a commission in the army. John suffered extreme short sight and was killed at the Battle of Loos.
I don’t see much of a market for six word books in the airport bookshops. Brevity is more about squeezing maximum impact from each word. My last post was about Chekhov’s Gun. That’s really saying the same thing about brevity. Every prop on stage must have a purpose, a role in the story.
Ironically, I’m looking at the draft of this post and thinking, “this is probably only around 250 words. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) will suggest 350 words as a minimum.” I’ll follow my own advice, and stop here, in the interest of brevity.