Don’t have time to sit with a book for hours? Here comes microfiction to the rescue.
As attention spans are getting shorter, a new form of story-telling has emerged. One which prides itself on brevity and simplicity. To cut a long story short, microfiction uses the least number of words, sometimes no more than 50, to tell a story.
Really tiny tales
Authors excelling in this format can cram entire universes and tell gripping stories complete with a beginning, middle and an end in just a few words.
Find it hard to believe? Here’s a famous six-word short story allegedly written by Ernest Hemingway: “For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.” In spite of being perfectly compact manages to paint a complete picture of thwarted desire and elicit strong feelings from the reader. Hemingway wrote 18 pieces of microfiction in his short story collection “In Our Time.”
Authors such as Virginia Woolf, O. Henry. Joyce Carol Oates, Arthur C. Clarke, H.P. Lovecraft, and Franz Kafka are also renowned for their microfiction.
Example
Today, Neil Gaiman is known for his flash fiction. Here’s an excerpt from his popular work “Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions”:
“Nicholas Was…older than sin, and his beard could grow no whiter. He wanted to die.
The dwarfish natives of the Arctic caverns did not speak his language but conversed in their own, twittering tongue, conducted incomprehensible rituals, when they were not actually working in the factories
Once every year they forced him, sobbing and protesting into Endless Night. During the journey he would stand near every child in the world, leave one of the dwarves invisible gifts by its bedside. The children slept frozen into time.
He envied Prometheus and Loki, Sisyphus and Judas. His punishment was harsher.
Ho, Ho, Ho.”
When less is more
Also called flash fiction, this form of story-telling has existed for many years, but has seen resurgence with the rise of microblogging sites such as Twitter and Instagram.
Authors are creating tiny tales to fit into the scant character limits of the social media platforms. The results can spark your imagination. Every word is carefully chosen for both style and content, with little room for niceties of long-form writing. Writing microfiction is like a contortionist trying to fit inside a suitcase. After all, as Shakespeare put it “Brevity is the soul of wit”.
Picture Credit : Google
