Story: “Life Goes On: Microfictions” and “Bad People: Microfictions” (<-Click there to read the stories!)
Genre: "Microfictions"
Keywords: The Bunny Ranch Brothel in Nevada Where It’s Legal; Sell-Out Ghost Towns; Elle Advice Columnists; Viking Invasions
Trivia: Several of these stories are only one or two sentences long.
Why did you start writing “short-short” stories like these?
I was stranded in San Jose on a business trip back in 2008 – at the last minute my flight got delayed by two days (meaning two extra unplanned nights in hotel rooms), but somehow all my co-workers were able to go home on their flights. I had a lot of time to kill, and I picked up an issue of Harper’s at a bookstore. I remember sitting at this outdoor table, I think on the rooftop patio of the store, reading these teeny-tiny stories by Paul Theroux.
I’d never seen anything like them. The instant I saw his stories, I knew I had to try to write some of my own. So I started doing that, and I fell in love with the form. I’ve since seen brilliant ones written by John Edgar Wideman – also in Harper’s, which has become my favorite magazine for discovering new (or, new-to-me) short fiction.
My “microfictions” have been the biggest hit by far out of all the writing I’ve shared with members of the short-fiction workshop I was going to in DC a while back. People were saying that it was imperative that I get them published, and I even got e-mails from two different members who hadn’t attended the particular meeting where I shared my first batch – they had heard such good things about my little stories from the other members, and the people who e-mailed me wanted to read them, too.
How do you pick a subject for one of these?
Although there’s no method or criteria I use for determining what will or won’t make a good microfiction subject, I went through this one weird phase during which I cranked out a bunch of decent ones as the result of a self-imposed writing exercise. At a past job, I was put in charge of starting up a blog to serve as a “friendly” mouthpiece for the organization’s president. She was kind of an artsy-hippie type, and she brought in this magazine for me to look at, featuring all of these faux-vintage-photo-centric blogs. You know – the kind with lots of pictures of vintage things (cameras, typewriters, pop bottles) and mugs of green tea and people’s toes standing in their herb garden or whatever, all of it with that gauzy Instagram gloss to it.
I remember flipping through that magazine (it was one of the thick, expensive ones printed on nice paper – the kind that costs $12 instead of $3), sort of gingerly, thinking that everything in it was so precious and corny. So as a strange sort of exercise, who even knows why, I started writing these pieces that delved into why each of those images were so potent to a certain kind of person. Or, I would use the image as a jumping-off point for a story. The answer was usually that these “pretty” things masked a kind of emptiness in a person’s life. Or so I imagined – which probably says more about me than it does about any particular segment of humanity.
But to actually answer your question, I can usually just sort of sense when something will work OK for a microfiction. It can be a moment or vignette that indicates something much larger, or it can be a whole life compressed into a paragraph. My only guideline is really just: Will this be a satisfying little read? I imagine these as highly polished gems, shimmering on the page or the screen. And because they’re so compressed, every word choice has to be perfect – every word is fighting to be there.
That leads into another question – how does your writing process or style differ when it comes to writing these short pieces?
In a strange way, it really doesn’t. The process is the same – I get an idea, I write it up. Even the style, I think, is still recognizably mine; I like to think you can still hear my “voice” in these.
The main difference, I think, is that there is necessarily more scrutiny given to every single word in a short-short piece, so again, every word must be perfect. Or, as perfect as a subjective and human-made thing can ever be. The one- and two-sentence ones are my favorite – as a writer, it feels as if I’m doing a circus trick when I pull that off – but also seem to come to me far more rarely. If your story is only one sentence long, it better be one damn profound sentence.
However – you often hear writers say stuff like: “The shortest pieces are the hardest to write.” It’s true that a reader will probably be likely to notice a bad word choice in something that's extremely short, but I don’t think these are necessarily harder to write than longer pieces. In fact, one of my biggest challenges is creating the necessary architecture, the buttresses and such, to support a big ol’ long, sprawling piece – maybe I like to write these so much because for me the short-shorts are easy.
Is there a reason you prefer the term “microfiction” to, say, “flash fiction” or “short-shorts”?
True story: For a batch of these that my friend Oliver published on his Moustache Club of America site, we totally used the title: “We Wear Short Shorts.”
I just think "microfiction" looks nice, one self-contained word. “Flash fiction” sounds to me like “flash mob” or “flash bomb," very... flashy, and some of my microfictions seem to occupy a world that’s slow and contemplative even though it doesn’t take very long to read them. For example, I wrote one about my grandmother looking out her kitchen window at a lady scarecrow that my grandfather made. The story focuses on that one moment and her thoughts in that moment, but refers to “his women,” and hints at a whole long marriage’s worth of infidelity on his part. It’s only a few paragraphs long, but it doesn’t feel very “flash” to me – she’s in her quiet house in the country, thinking back on a lifetime of sorrow.
I guess, regardless of what I just said about how it’s fun to pull off the one-sentence party trick – “flash fiction” sounds to me as if you’re saying, “Ta da!” For me, writing these tiny fictions isn’t about pulling a stunt or a prank; to me, a true microfiction could never be anything else. Those stories must be at home in their short-short form. The decision to write them short should be about doing what’s best for the story, not what will look cool or tricksy, or will meet the requirements of some trendy flash-fiction contest.
Which ones of these are based on true stories?
“Bunnies” is about something my friend Zack once talked about doing if he didn’t lose his virginity by a certain age; he didn’t do that (that I know of), but I imagined what it might be like if he had.
I wrote “The man with the stutter” after going to a friend’s Greek-myths-themed play, and meeting a guy with a stutter around the same time. I don’t have a stutter, but I’ve always felt tongue-tied and awkward socially, so in that sense, I can relate.
“Calico” is based on an actual disappointing ghost town I stopped at once when I was driving out West.
“Peace pie” was totally my husband’s idea. Or, it stemmed from an idea of his that we both riffed on, and I made it into a little story.
I wrote “Cut Off Your Nose” after reading what Wikipedia had to say about the origins of the phrase “cut off your nose to spite your face.”
“Hang in there, toots” is based on actual answer given by Elle magazine’s “Ask Auntie E.” I love her column, but I found that particular response well-meaning yet troubling.
And as I mentioned earlier, “Scarecrow” is about my grandparents. I wrote a whole batch of microfictions about their relationship; this is just one of them.
Genre: "Microfictions"
Keywords: The Bunny Ranch Brothel in Nevada Where It’s Legal; Sell-Out Ghost Towns; Elle Advice Columnists; Viking Invasions
Trivia: Several of these stories are only one or two sentences long.
Why did you start writing “short-short” stories like these?
I was stranded in San Jose on a business trip back in 2008 – at the last minute my flight got delayed by two days (meaning two extra unplanned nights in hotel rooms), but somehow all my co-workers were able to go home on their flights. I had a lot of time to kill, and I picked up an issue of Harper’s at a bookstore. I remember sitting at this outdoor table, I think on the rooftop patio of the store, reading these teeny-tiny stories by Paul Theroux.
I’d never seen anything like them. The instant I saw his stories, I knew I had to try to write some of my own. So I started doing that, and I fell in love with the form. I’ve since seen brilliant ones written by John Edgar Wideman – also in Harper’s, which has become my favorite magazine for discovering new (or, new-to-me) short fiction.
My “microfictions” have been the biggest hit by far out of all the writing I’ve shared with members of the short-fiction workshop I was going to in DC a while back. People were saying that it was imperative that I get them published, and I even got e-mails from two different members who hadn’t attended the particular meeting where I shared my first batch – they had heard such good things about my little stories from the other members, and the people who e-mailed me wanted to read them, too.
How do you pick a subject for one of these?
Although there’s no method or criteria I use for determining what will or won’t make a good microfiction subject, I went through this one weird phase during which I cranked out a bunch of decent ones as the result of a self-imposed writing exercise. At a past job, I was put in charge of starting up a blog to serve as a “friendly” mouthpiece for the organization’s president. She was kind of an artsy-hippie type, and she brought in this magazine for me to look at, featuring all of these faux-vintage-photo-centric blogs. You know – the kind with lots of pictures of vintage things (cameras, typewriters, pop bottles) and mugs of green tea and people’s toes standing in their herb garden or whatever, all of it with that gauzy Instagram gloss to it.
I remember flipping through that magazine (it was one of the thick, expensive ones printed on nice paper – the kind that costs $12 instead of $3), sort of gingerly, thinking that everything in it was so precious and corny. So as a strange sort of exercise, who even knows why, I started writing these pieces that delved into why each of those images were so potent to a certain kind of person. Or, I would use the image as a jumping-off point for a story. The answer was usually that these “pretty” things masked a kind of emptiness in a person’s life. Or so I imagined – which probably says more about me than it does about any particular segment of humanity.
But to actually answer your question, I can usually just sort of sense when something will work OK for a microfiction. It can be a moment or vignette that indicates something much larger, or it can be a whole life compressed into a paragraph. My only guideline is really just: Will this be a satisfying little read? I imagine these as highly polished gems, shimmering on the page or the screen. And because they’re so compressed, every word choice has to be perfect – every word is fighting to be there.
That leads into another question – how does your writing process or style differ when it comes to writing these short pieces?
In a strange way, it really doesn’t. The process is the same – I get an idea, I write it up. Even the style, I think, is still recognizably mine; I like to think you can still hear my “voice” in these.
The main difference, I think, is that there is necessarily more scrutiny given to every single word in a short-short piece, so again, every word must be perfect. Or, as perfect as a subjective and human-made thing can ever be. The one- and two-sentence ones are my favorite – as a writer, it feels as if I’m doing a circus trick when I pull that off – but also seem to come to me far more rarely. If your story is only one sentence long, it better be one damn profound sentence.
However – you often hear writers say stuff like: “The shortest pieces are the hardest to write.” It’s true that a reader will probably be likely to notice a bad word choice in something that's extremely short, but I don’t think these are necessarily harder to write than longer pieces. In fact, one of my biggest challenges is creating the necessary architecture, the buttresses and such, to support a big ol’ long, sprawling piece – maybe I like to write these so much because for me the short-shorts are easy.
Is there a reason you prefer the term “microfiction” to, say, “flash fiction” or “short-shorts”?
True story: For a batch of these that my friend Oliver published on his Moustache Club of America site, we totally used the title: “We Wear Short Shorts.”
I just think "microfiction" looks nice, one self-contained word. “Flash fiction” sounds to me like “flash mob” or “flash bomb," very... flashy, and some of my microfictions seem to occupy a world that’s slow and contemplative even though it doesn’t take very long to read them. For example, I wrote one about my grandmother looking out her kitchen window at a lady scarecrow that my grandfather made. The story focuses on that one moment and her thoughts in that moment, but refers to “his women,” and hints at a whole long marriage’s worth of infidelity on his part. It’s only a few paragraphs long, but it doesn’t feel very “flash” to me – she’s in her quiet house in the country, thinking back on a lifetime of sorrow.
I guess, regardless of what I just said about how it’s fun to pull off the one-sentence party trick – “flash fiction” sounds to me as if you’re saying, “Ta da!” For me, writing these tiny fictions isn’t about pulling a stunt or a prank; to me, a true microfiction could never be anything else. Those stories must be at home in their short-short form. The decision to write them short should be about doing what’s best for the story, not what will look cool or tricksy, or will meet the requirements of some trendy flash-fiction contest.
Which ones of these are based on true stories?
“Bunnies” is about something my friend Zack once talked about doing if he didn’t lose his virginity by a certain age; he didn’t do that (that I know of), but I imagined what it might be like if he had.
I wrote “The man with the stutter” after going to a friend’s Greek-myths-themed play, and meeting a guy with a stutter around the same time. I don’t have a stutter, but I’ve always felt tongue-tied and awkward socially, so in that sense, I can relate.
“Calico” is based on an actual disappointing ghost town I stopped at once when I was driving out West.
“Peace pie” was totally my husband’s idea. Or, it stemmed from an idea of his that we both riffed on, and I made it into a little story.
I wrote “Cut Off Your Nose” after reading what Wikipedia had to say about the origins of the phrase “cut off your nose to spite your face.”
“Hang in there, toots” is based on actual answer given by Elle magazine’s “Ask Auntie E.” I love her column, but I found that particular response well-meaning yet troubling.
And as I mentioned earlier, “Scarecrow” is about my grandparents. I wrote a whole batch of microfictions about their relationship; this is just one of them.
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