Microfiction: A Beginner’s Exercise

I personally define microfiction as any work of fiction of 500 words or less (as opposed to flash fiction, which is almost universally defined as fiction of 1000 words or less). However, microfiction frequently means short fiction of 100 words or less — often called a “drabble” — and that’s what I’m going to be talking about here.

For many new to creative writing, something like microfiction may seem cruelly impossible to create; the desire to develop characters, to add colour to scenery, to run actions and narratives all the way through to their logical (and illogical) ends may seem too great a temptation to overcome, even if you set out to write a very short piece.

I struggled at first myself; my first piece of microfiction ended up being over 140 words long in spite of my best efforts to stick to a target of 100 or less, but I gradually managed to reduce it down (it eventually became the ‘G is for “Gap”’ segment in my “The Alphabet Soup of Life, Love, and Death”, a “meta-story” consisting of twenty-six pieces, mostly microfictions, but also micro-essays, a haiku, and a micro-dialogue).

I’ve since written over forty pieces of fiction of this size, and have had seven of them published individually, and the largest number of them as parts of “The Alphabet…”.

I’ve never much been one for giving advice on creative writing — given relatively extremely minor successes in the field over the past year — but I think I can possibly give some decent pointers here given that my microfiction has moved faster into publication than any of my longer works as of yet.

Why should you write microfiction? Because it really is a challenge to do so much (even if only implied) in such a short space. It will test your strengths and expand your skills as a writer, and will force you to appreciate the power of brevity. As I’ve said before, over-writing just wastes both your and the reader’s time, and it’s best to eliminate it as much as possible.

I’ve always held that the best way to learn is through example, and the microfiction sites that I have both read the most of and have had the most success with publishing-wise have been Microfiction Monday Magazine (which I recommend you subscribe to through email), 50-Word Stories, and The Drabble.

Please, if you’ve never explored microfiction before, go explore these sites for an hour or two; read a good few dozen from each.

After you’ve done that, select your favourites, and dissect them for a while, asking yourself a few questions, such as

· How do these stories fit into traditional narrative models of beginning, middle, and end (B-M-E)?

· What has potentially been taken out to allow them to be so short? What has been left to leave them still functional and effective?

· How have traditional factors such as narrative voice and character development remained strong even in such minimalist expressions?

I’m going to be unbearably vain and take my own story, “In a Pickle”, for an example.

“In a Pickle” follows the traditional model of B-M-E: the beginning is the narrator noticing Holly has attempted to pickle some eggs. This puts us straight into the narrative action, and establishes a recognisable personal relationship between the narrator and Holly, even if we don’t know exactly what relationship is (Friends? Lovers? Brother and sister? In microfiction, as long as a relationship is firmly established, and is able to move forward, even in the smallest ways, any more detail is usually superfluous, unless it is necessary to the plot or resolution of course).

The middle is the dialogue: the narrator asks a question and Holly responds. It provides the necessary “action” to move the narrative along to its conclusion, even if it doesn’t seem like much.

The end actually presents the middle as a potential site of conflict that was in practice avoided. Why does the narrator not tell her? Is he being kind? Or is he an unreliable griot and in fact being cruel? Such practice of purposeful omission makes microfiction effective. Even though it may be an extreme cliché, in this format less is always more.

It is entirely possible to expand this story to perhaps the length of a thousand words or more, adding in elements of the characters’ life stories and emotional states, but in a 50 word story, such things are excised or unexplored, breaking it down into three very small parts that fit nicely enough together (or at least that’s why I hope the editor for 50-Word Stories accepted it).

Microfiction often depicts a scene that relates to an implied larger story that exists above itself, but this may in itself be obscured, or even non-existant.

Now, are you ready yet?

If so, think about what you want to write. Is there a little nugget of something you can’t fit or develop into something larger? An incident in your life that is merely just that, an incident, but is so fascinating that it has a life of its own, and you wish to bring it to the wider world? Do you have a scene in your head that won’t leave you alone?

Therein lies your inspiration.

When actually writing it though, just remember a few things:

· What story are you trying to tell? Remember to stick to that at its core.

· If you can cut an event out, cut it out. If you can reduce the whole story to just one event, then you’ve cracked it.

· Either reduce dialogue to a minimum or make the story mostly dialogue; switching between dialogue and narrative can often take up too much lexical space.

· Have only a tiny number of characters, if possible, just two in conflict or in co-operation (or maybe just in dialogue).

· Go back through repeatedly, getting rid of unnecessary words, exposition, or even whole sentences. The mantra is and will remain: less is more.

After you’ve done all that and got it down to about 100 words or less, then you can proceed to the next level: take that drabble and reduce it down to 50 words. Just follow the exact same processes but be even more fanatical; if necessary, ignore (but don’t delete of course) the original and write a completely new interpretation of the story underneath. Sometimes it can be as simple as chopping the end off of the story; others require a complete re-creation.

Don’t think it can be done? “Nigh” was originally 98 words, but when MFM rejected it, I cut it all the way down to 50 and 50-Word Stories accepted it. With patience and practice it can be achieved.

Once you’ve completed both versions, you’re ready to submit for publication, my suggestion being one of the drabble sites with the 100 word version first, and then trying 50-Word Stories with the 50 word version if they should reject it. Don’t be disheartened if your first efforts don’t make it; literally none of mine did on the first few tries. You just need to keep writing and experimenting, and you’ll get there with practice.

Happy (and productive) writing!