Flash fiction
about letters.
A letter is a conversation with someone who isn't there yet.
The written voice · Distance & intimacy · What gets said in writing
The letter is one of literature's oldest forms and one of the most revealing — because writing to a specific person changes what you say and how you say it. The voice in a letter is different from the voice in a diary, different again from the voice in a story. Tumbleweed Words contains pieces written as letters — to cities left behind, to people who cannot be reached, to former selves who made specific decisions. The letter form inside flash fiction produces an immediacy that third-person narration cannot match.
"Dear Edinburgh, I am sorry I keep leaving you. I do not think of you as home when I am away. When I am away I think of you as the place that waits. This is perhaps worse."
David — Tumbleweed Words — Edinburgh
The letter form inside flash fiction creates productive tension between the intimacy of address — the reader feels implicated, spoken to directly — and the knowledge that this is fiction. Use this tension deliberately. Write letters that could only be sent in fiction: to the dead, to the city, to the self at an earlier moment. The impossible address is the most honest one.
Read the letters.
Flash fiction in the form of letters that could only be written in fiction. Free.
Read on Tumbleweed Words →