Discussion → What is microfiction besides short?
-
To me, microfiction is the miniature galaxy hanging from the cat's collar in Men in Black. What can and can't it do?
-
Here are three of mine that I consider as being pieces of micro-fiction:
"Improbability as Main Course" in Dogzplot
http://dogzplot.blogspot.com/2011/03/improbability-as-main-course-sam.htmlThe three individual sections in "The Sleep of Trees (Three Parables)" in Wigleaf
http://www.wigleaf.com/201108measure.htm"Mothers of Invention" in Six Sentences
http://sixsentences.blogspot.com/2010/09/mothers-of-invention.htmlI also consider these to be prose poems. And I absolutely agree with you that micro-fiction and prose poems are closely aligned.
-
Sam, those are fantastic examples of PROSE POEM MICROFICTIONS. I also love the idea of sneaking in through the back door stellar examples of PUBLISHED MICROFICTION through links in the discussion section. I want to encourage all those with published stories they feel might be instructive or just fun to do so. I'd like to talk more about what aspects of your pieces make them prose poems versus microfiction. What qualities in a piece veer it from one side to another. This is helpful in helping microfictioners more consciously notice what they are doing What do you think?
Group Description
ALL MICROFICTION ALL THE TIME.
Here's a place to post both published and unpublished Microfiction and a place to discuss and debate the special aesthetics of the genre.
Some sources claim word count under 100, others under 200, others under 400 and still others under 500. Your guess is as good as mine, but 500 is the absolute limit. The shorter the better. Poetry welcome.
Joseph Young in FRIGG, Spring 2009, wrote,
"To be its own genre, microfiction needs to do something that other forms won’t. It needs to use language, description, dialogue, character to tell a story that can’t be told any other way. It’s not just compression, and it’s not just leaving things out, background info on characters or such. Microfiction needs to carve out whole worlds in a space small enough to fit the eye. You look, just once, and there the whole story is, on the page...
"If fiction (e.g., narrative) is time, then microfiction is microtime. But let me caveat. A microfiction can describe the entire life of a character. It can illustrate birth, marriage, death, 80 years of experience. But the amount from that 80 years that actually occurs in microfiction, in microtime, is nearly nothing, a tenth of a second."
Me? I think of microfiction as the miniature galaxy inside the marble hung from the cat's collar in Men in Black.
To keep this group vibrant and alive, don't just post and run. Take the time to comment and especially engage in the discussion threads. It will make for a richer group experience.
--Gloria Garfunkel, Micro Cafe Barista
This is a public group.
Anyone can see it and join.