In April, I’m running a writing workshop on horror microfiction. It’s been a long time since I’ve taught a workshop rather than simply facilitated a writing session. I’ve been thinking a lot about tiny stories over the years and it will be good to crystallise my thoughts on the topic – starting with some notes on this blog.
Why write microfiction
- I think my love of microfiction comes from reading comic books, and how the captions would sometimes refer to other stories, firing up my imagination. A lot of the books I loved best as a teenager intentionally played with this.
- I always found these hints more interesting than what was later set as canon. Franchise fiction will introduce mysterious characters and eventually fill in the backstories, and something is lost.
- I think the same sort of references work in horror – the hints of something awful happening are often worse than what can be depicted onscreen. There’s a power to creating a gap for other people to fill in.
- I can’t be sure that these gaps are something that everyone loves – maybe some people prefer stories to be defined and complete. But, for me, I like ambiguities and mysteries.
Baby Shoes
- A lot of people have come up with theories about what a ‘story’ is. Generally, a story will include characters going through some sort of event, with a beginning, middle and end.
- But this is not true of every story – for example, Baby Shoes. This is the archetypal tiny story, but it works as a piece of found text. The three two-word sentences reveal an event that has already happened – and the change in the story is in our understanding of what we are seeing.
- For Sale – tells us this is some sort of advertisement.
- Baby Shoes – introduces the characters by implication, a parent and a child.
- Never Worn – a twist in the tale, leaving us to realise why these shoes are good-as-new.
- This story is often attributed to Hemingway, but versions of it date back to 1906, and the attribution seems to have come from 1989 (both facts according to Wikipedia).
- This inspired the six-word memoirs project
Technique
- The most important thing about writing tiny stories is that they are stories rather than descriptions of a story. It’s easy to fall into this trap. Rosy has rejected quite a few advent calendar stories on that basis.
- You can see this in a lot of collections of six word stories. A lot of them feel glib – there’s not enough space for the pathos these aim for.
- You can only cut back a story a certain amount. You need some sort of change for a story, otherwise it becomes a description.
Future Plans?
- I’ve always wanted to write a novel from fragments. It’s something I’ve played with, but never tried as seriously as I should have done. My professor for my MA, Nicholas Royle, asserted you could not make a novel from vignettes, but I am convinced that you can.
- I think I’m going to make some prototypes then give this a proper try. I suspect very few people would read any novel I write but, at the moment, I’m more interested in questions of craft than audience.