Maybe the trick is to get people to read fiction in really small portions. That’s the idea, at least, behind Fast Food Fiction: a collection of short, short stories (all pieces run at 1,000 words or less) recently put out by Anvil Publishing.
Sixty stories by 57 local writers, all less than four pages long. The result is fiction you can read anywhere – on the MRT, in the office, waiting for your number to be called at the LTO. Perfect, in short, for today’s busy urban dweller.
But that doesn’t mean the pieces come up short on content. After a few patient years of wheedling and pleading, editor Noelle de Jesus managed to convince a batch of diverse writers to contribute one or two stories to this collection (all in English, by the way; an all-Filipino collection should be Anvil Publisher Korina Bolasco’s next project). You’ll find names like Gregorio C. Brilliantes, Jessica Zafra, Jose Y. Dalisay Jr., Ramon C. Sunico, Nadine Sarreal and Fran Ng in Fast Food Fiction. You’ll also get a look at how the "fast fiction" form (also known as "flash" or "postcard" fiction) can be explored and manipulated in interesting new ways. With a mix of young and old writers, there’s a wide range of expression here – everything from the Filipino abroad to the far reaches of science fiction (comic book writer Budjette Tan’s "And All Things Nice").
Small moments are poetically compressed (as in Butch Dalisay’s meditation on a seashell, "Cypraea Leucodon"), characters convincingly studied (Jaime Lim’s "Son"), snapshots taken (Libay Linsangan Cantor’s "Aperture"); quicksilver insights on love and loss surface in page after page.
Variety is the lifeblood of such a project, but often styles can clash or lead to a scattered, disjointed collection. Not so here, I think. De Jesus did an admirable job of picking and choosing, grouping stories in batches of five (though in no discernible order). If there is one interlocking theme to these pieces, it’s brevity: the writers work on the fly, as it were, under the assumption that the average reader is also in a hurry. An advantage to this approach is: if one story doesn’t quite grab you, you can quickly forget it and move on to the next.
A small confession here: I am one of the writers represented in Fast Food Fiction, and so is my wife, Therese. (My story, "Love Birds," appeared in a slightly different form in these pages two years back. My wife’s story is called "Beauty.") Self-serving as it may be, I have no problem saying this volume is worth checking out, just for the sheer variety of writing talent. One interesting thing is that none of the writers, as far as I know, was aware of who else would be involved, or what others were working on. We just blindly threw our stories into one big pot, and let De Jesus drain off the dregs. She deserves credit for making it all gel into something good.
Since there were no rules about theme, content or style, Fast Food Fiction runs all over the map, from humor and satire (Zafra’s "The Boy Next Door" draws the first laughs in the book, and Roberto Clemente’s "What They’re Reading in Manila" is a satirical gem about a yearbook editor who goes nuts and decides to print all the city’s dark, dirty secrets) to surreal fantasy (Ma. Milagros T. Garcia-Agustines’ "The Centaur").
Length also varies. Lilledeshan Bose’s "What Is To Come" runs a mere 124 words, while Dalisay’s piece is precisely 500 words (which was De Jesus’s original request to her contributors, thus proving it can be done). Most of us strayed toward the 1,000 limit. A piece like Carla Pacis "Star" occupies a single, unbroken paragraph; others manage to weave two or three short vignettes into 700 words (Bose’s "The Break-Up Stories"). Gay lifestyles are explored by some (Jose Claudio Guerrero’s "Saturday Nights When Quilts Get Ruined," Floy C. Quintos "Ninong Tells A Story"), while motherhood is another persistent theme.
A story like Fan Ng’s "White Elephants Like Hills" slyly inverts the Hemingway classic it’s based on, while others take a look at deadly-serious issues such as the death penalty (Sarreal’s "Clearing Debt") or female oppression (Sunico’s "Our Secret Language").
I guess what really helps this collection stand out is texture. Five hundred to 1,000 words is not a lot of room in which to create a living, breathing world, but the best pieces in Fast Food Fiction do just that. Some pieces strive too hard, some could have used fewer adjectives and more development, some writers suffer in comparison to more experienced masters. But it’s a curious thing: I read this collection a month ago, shortly after it was launched. As I peruse the titles again now, I realize that quite a few of them still seem fresh in my mind. Like a pop song with good hooks, there’s a surprising amount of impact to be found in such a short, pithy form. Maybe it proves that the "fast fiction" genre is about more than just flashy classroom exercises. Texture and impact are qualities you may not expect from a book with "fast food" in the title. But – surprise – it‘s in there.
And what do you know? My review came in under 1,000 words.