On micro-fiction

Some thoughts about my recent experiments with micro-fiction

Recently I’ve been experimenting with 50 word stories. I had found myself struggling to make a particular story work, and one of the causes for its stubbornness was trying to stretch it out over 2000+ words, leading to a bloated story that went nowhere.

I was ready to give up, when my wife suggested I turn it into a piece of flash fiction, so I set about stripping away as much as I could, to the point where I was left with a single paragraph. I thought I might have gone a bit too far until I recalled the famous six-word story which I was introduced to in a recent writing class:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

This story raises so many questions. It says so much, whilst simultaneously saying nothing. It is rife with ambiguity, which happens to be my favourite thing about short stories.

Inspired by this, I checked the word count of my single paragraph story and noticed it was just over 50 words, so I trimmed it down to exactly 50. I proceeded to try writing with this constraint using some other ideas that I was having difficulty with.

The results of this experiment were interesting, in that it forced me to be OK with leaving out lots of detail, restricting the context to the bare minimum. I love ambiguity in stories, novels and films, but I don’t like ambiguity for ambiguities sake, so that was something I wanted to be mindful of.

I may continue experimenting in this format from time to time, but my plan is to get back to writing longer stories.