Micro Fiction

Expressing myself in a concise manner has never been one of my skills. Often friends suffer my long-winded rambles about whatever I’m going through on any given day. My hands will move about for emphasis, or my voice may go up higher in pitch and if I’m really excited, I will throw in some jumping up and down or pacing back and forth. Not that I’m an extrovert but being verbose at least with my closest friends prompted them to suggest that I blog. The bottom line is that it’s difficult for me to get to the point succinctly.

So what was I thinking when I signed up for Twitter? Twitter is all about micro messages that convey a lot with a few words. Can I do this? The only way to find out is to try it, which I did. I’ve only posted a few messages because I find it very difficult to say anything with the allotted 140 characters. 140 characters – really? That includes spaces and punctuation!

I read some of the micro-fiction that writers post to Twitter and found them fascinating. They use the same 140-character max to create their mini-stories. I’m just amazed that they can do this so I want to try to do it too. Okay, here we go:

First Draft

“Henry, a gnome broke into the house!” He opened bleary eyes “It’s your turn. I took care of it last time.” Alice reached for the cleaver she kept under the bed. (164 characters – this isn’t good. It’s 24 characters over the max.)

Second Draft

“Henry, a gnome broke into the house! He opened bleary eyes “It’s your turn.” He went back to sleep. “Fine” she said and reached for the cleaver that was under the bed. (168 characters – this is worse. It’s 28 characters over the max. I have to do better.)

Third Draft

“Henry, a gnome broke into the house!” He opened bleary eyes “I took care of it last time.” “Fine,” she said “I’ll kill it – you cook it.” (138 characters - Yay!)

I struggled with this because I kept trying to expand instead of condense the story. Wow, micro-fiction is hard but I had fun with it.