Wouldn’t you know it: two days after telling you that I seldom use the exclamation point, it makes an appearance in the title of a post for the second time in a row.
Its presence is deserved, I think, to help convey the joy of getting published less than a month into this new leg of my writing journey.
“Lunch Break,” a bit of micro fiction I submitted to the website Paragraph Planet, is today’s featured story on the site. Huzzah!
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been playing around with flash fiction and its subgenre micro fiction as a way of trying to crystallize my writing. Instead of rambling on as I can do here, or would with a more traditional short story or novel, I’m constrained by the tight walls of flash fiction (1,500 words or fewer) and the strait jacket of micro fiction (100 words or fewer). Maybe the constraints of flash fiction will help me be a better writer or, at least, a better self-editor.
If any of my fellow writers are interested in trying their hand at micro fiction, I encourage you to crank out a 75-word story and submit it to Paragraph Planet. Your story title is included in the word count, so don’t start out with a longish title. You won’t make any money from it, but you’ll get a full day’s worth of internet fame if you promote it properly.
The back story
The inspiration for “Lunch break” came from two sources:
- A note a jotted down of something that caught my eye as I left a local convenience store: a woman sitting behind the wheel of her idling car, eating a bowl of soup. (This is why I try to carry a small note pad with me wherever I go.) I thought this little scene could be part of a story sometime.
- A writing prompt to write about someone who is running out of time.
I combined the two ideas, left out a lot of the back story about the woman that I had developed in my head (she was slurping down microwaved soup because she’d forgotten to bring her salad to work, left it on the counter because she was too busy feeding the dogs, and she had hoped to take her dirty car to the car wash over lunch break, and more stuff like that), and stripped it down to the 75 words.
“Lunch break” isn’t a perfect little work of art, but it’s a start, and I find that worth celebrating.
Andy writes! 
In Sunday’s NYT Book Review, Sigrid Nunez mentioned three qualities essential to good writing: “effective concision of language, meticulous use of detail and sensitivity to cadence.” Your micro story is a great example of all three.
Thanks, Maridel. I need to find that article. (I’m a NYT subscriber but not always a dutiful reader.)
Very cool. Congrats. Writing with a word count max that is super low is challenging but worth it. I had to cut a short story in half once to meet a newspaper’s criteria. It was daunting but the result was a story I liked better.
Thanks. One of the things I liked about old Twitter was the strict character count. Creativity within constraints can be a challenge, but fun.
When I started dabbling in stand-up comedy, I had essentially two types of jokes (longer topical pieces, and short one-off bits). The short bits I’d craft using Twitter because of the character limit. It also helped me get better at refining my longer pieces.