Short-short Storytelling

Google: "300 words."

Result: Reporter Brady Dennis wrote a series called "300 Words" for the St. Petersburg Times. His short-short storytelling won him an Ernie Pyle Award for human interest writing. They highlight "ordinary" people with a story to tell.

Lessons:

• Capture a moment
• Find a universal theme: love, loss, death, change, new beginnings — something everyone can relate to. Not just "an interesting person."
• Make sure audience knows why story is important and worth their time.
• Rely on observation, not quotes. Don't interview; watch and listen.
• Cut out the fat. Less is more.

Flash Fiction

My entry on micro minimovies got me thinking about the kind of writing that needs to go with them.

Flash fiction is a very short form of story-telling -- maybe only 75 words, maybe up to a couple hundred, though I've see definitions that go up to 1000. While the definitions take themselves seriously, I'm having a hard time distinguishing between flash fiction and a joke. Guy walks into a bar... A priest, a minister, and a rabbi...

Hasn't Reader's Digest been publishing "flash fiction" in the form of reader-contributed anecdotes for decades? Isn't that sort of what all those Chicken Soup books are about? Do you believe all those sappy little first-person tales are true? Maybe I'll buy that they are based on facts and polished up, just like every episode of Law and Order is "ripped from the headlines."

From the tone of the articles on flash fiction, I think this form has more literary ambitions than a shaggy dog story. Are they more like fables or fairy tales? Once upon a time...

I have a book on "sudden fiction" and I have to confess that I've never been able to get into it. The shorties seem more like little meditations on an emotional state -- not stories, where you start out at one place and end up at another. They present beautiful detailed images, but I keep thinking they must only be scenes in a larger story.

Maybe the idea is that you fill in the rest on the power of the short scene. Like Hemingway's famous 6-word story: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

I just realized I've been here before. I used to write novels but when my agent finally gave up after a couple years of trying to get them published, I turned to the shorter forms of the internet. I spin off these little non-fiction essays without much thought, but there is an abandoned section of Mad in Pursuit where I was going to post short-shorts. I looked at them now. They are really just scenes I liked from various false starts. They definitely describe emotional states, but don't particularly progress from a starting state to an ending state.

P.S. Jim pointed me toward the funny papers: self-contained stories in 4 panels.

 

3.9.01