How Short Is a Short Story?

I recently finished a short story that came in at 384 words. At least, I thought of it as a short story while I was writing it. The question only occurred to me afterward, when I had to decide how to publish it here.

I usually title fiction posts using a simple format: Short Story | [Story Title]. It tells you what you’re about to read without making a big production out of it. But 384 words made me wonder whether “short story” was really the best description. It is undeniably short, sure, and it’s a story, so there’s a wonderfully literal argument that nothing more needs to be said. Still, we have a more specific term for fiction of that length: flash fiction.

That led me to wonder where, exactly, all these categories begin and end. There is no universal system for classifying fiction by word count. I’ve seen different publishers, competitions, organizations, and writers use different limits, particularly when dealing with shorter forms. Still, the terminology tends to fall somewhere around these ranges:

Form	Typical Word Count	Notes
Six-Word Story	Exactly 6	A specific constraint rather than a broad form
Microfiction / Micro Story	Under 300	Definition varies widely
Flash Fiction	300 – 1,000	Often capped at 500, 750, or 1,000
Sudden Fiction	750 – 1,500	Loosely defined; overlaps with flash fiction
Short-Short Story	1,000 – 2,000	Older/looser term; overlaps with flash and short stories
Short Story	1,000 – 7,500	No universally agreed lower limit
Novelette	7,500 – 17,500	Commonly used in speculative-fiction publishing
Novella	17,500 – 40,000
Novel	40,000+	The taxonomy largely stops here
Long Novel	100,000+	Description, not a formal category
Very Long Novel	150,000+	Description, not a formal category
Doorstopper	200,000+	Informal; no established threshold
Absolute Unit	300,000+	Extremely rigorous scholarly classification*
Physical Representation of Overcompensation	500,000+	Seek help

*It is not.

These aren’t rules so much as useful conventions. Short Beasts and Flash Frog accept flash fiction up to 1,000 words, while Milk Candy Review caps it at 750, and Free Flash Fiction and Toasted Cheese Literary Journal cap it at 500. Microfiction is even less settled. Depending on where you look, it can mean fiction under 300 words, under 100 words, or simply fiction that is exceptionally brief.

There’s also, wonderfully, something called a short-short story. The term has been around for decades and generally refers to stories considerably shorter than conventional short stories. It’s a perfectly legitimate literary term, although I have to admit that it sounds like somebody encountered the phrase “short story,” decided it wasn’t sufficiently short, and solved the problem with a happy little redundancy.

So when does one form become another? The strange thing about these classifications is how arbitrary they become at the boundaries. I could write a 995-word piece and call it flash fiction. If I add a couple of sentences and push it over 1,000 words, have I suddenly written a short story instead? Has anything meaningful about the work changed? Obviously not. A word-count boundary has to exist somewhere if a publisher or competition needs one, but fiction itself doesn’t care about round numbers. The difference between 999 and 1,001 words is administrative, not artistic.

That doesn’t mean the labels are useless. They tell readers roughly what sort of commitment they’re making, and they give writers and publishers a shared vocabulary. If a magazine says it wants flash fiction, everyone understands that it isn’t looking for a 7,000-word story. The categories become less convincing only when we start treating their borders as if they represent some fundamental change in the nature of the writing.

Still, I do think there’s a point at which length begins to affect form. Flash fiction isn’t just a shorter short story. I wouldn’t think of a 384-word story as just a 4,000-word story with most of the words removed. When you write in such a small space, it changes the decisions you make. There is so little room for anything that performs only one function, so details have to do several jobs at once.

You might describe something to establish setting while revealing something about a character. A line of dialogue might tell us about a relationship while also hinting at an event that happened years earlier. An object that would merely decorate a room in a novel might have to suggest an entire history in flash fiction.

More importantly, the writer has to become comfortable with omission. You can’t explain everything, and often you shouldn’t try. Instead, you provide enough information for the reader to construct what isn’t on the page. A few carefully chosen details can imply a history, a relationship, or even an entire world beyond the boundaries of the story.

That’s where the very short fiction becomes particularly interesting to me. Compression isn’t simply about saying the same thing in fewer words. More importantly, it’s about deciding how little you can say while still allowing something much larger to exist in the reader’s mind.

This raises the question “How small can a story get?” Once a story is reduced to a few hundred words, a hundred words, or even a handful of sentences, the boundaries between a story, a scene, an anecdote, a fragment, and a prose poem can become increasingly difficult to define. Yet, a remarkably small piece of fiction can still contain the things we normally associate with much longer stories. It can suggest character and conflict. Time can pass. Something can change. A revelation can alter our understanding of what came before. The writer may only give us a few sentences, but those sentences can imply events extending years beyond what actually appears on the page

So what do I call 384 words? After wandering through all of this terminology, I ended back where I started: trying to decide what label to put above one story on my website. “Short story” wouldn’t be wrong. Flash fiction is, after all, fiction, and it certainly is short. But Flash Fiction | The Repairman tells you something more specific, and 384 words sits comfortably within what most people would recognize as flash.

So that’s what I’m going with. As for “short-short story,” I’m delighted to know the term exists, and am equally delighted that I don’t have to use it.