How Micro Can A Microfiction Be?

Introduction

Is it writing or is it creating? Is it both or is it neither? I think it is both.

I have expressed slight dismay at the short from constructs in fiction and poetry, and I thought I could get away with writing less than six hundred words in this piece but I would have to submit it under fiction, but this is opinion not fiction.

Some Things I Have Tried

I have attempted to make a blank post of Vocal, it was rejected. Then I tried the concept of a one-word poem. The concept is cool but the application is more difficult.

I do see poems that contain one word per line and obviously a Fibonacci Poem starts with two single-word lines although it can start with more and still keep the sequence, however, this Fibonacci poem had a final line that consisted of eighty-four syllables (if I counted them right) so what could have been a micro poem certainly was not.

When I first came into Vocal there was a six hundred word limit for articles but that was reduced (possibly to zero) for the two recent microfiction challenges with were fifty to a hundred words and exactly two hundred words for the micro heist one.

I am very lucky in that I can take inspiration for everything and found these simple to create but I felt I was being very lazy when I did it because I can usually get my ideas down in a few words, and always feel that I need to elucidate further on what I have put down.

My normal writing style is fairly laconic so the longer the piece the less it is like my normal work but I have pieces that have hit between two and three thousand words, especially interviews with musicians and artists.

Many people think there should be no lower limit for creations but I do think that there should be a limit on challenge entries especially for short forms like micro fiction and poetry forms such as haiku.

The problem here is then, say there is a limit of three entries and then you create a fourth which is better than the rest. You may not be able to enter it in the challenge even though you are sure it would be a winner. There would have to be a mechanism for you to easily remove a story from the challenge.

I see the short-form challenge as a sort of free lottery ticket. You can create and enter things quickly and enter as many times as you want. Your creations may not be read by other creators but have to be assessed by Vocal Challenge Moderators, and personally, I think limiting Challenge entries may result in more objective assessments to decide the winners, after all assessing two thousand entries will allow more time per entry than twenty thousand.

Twenty thousand entries may be better to show that Vocal has got a bigger share of the creative market though, so my ideas may be a no-go with Vocal.

This Top Story was one of my six micro fiction entries, so I am not averse to trying to take more than my fair share of entries in these challenges.

Another Top Story went into a Haiku challenge but I restrained myself to two for this one. I was surprised that this did not place in the Challenge.

Conclusion

Short fiction and poems set their own challenges and I believe that they should be encouraged but should be limited in the challenges. We can write and publish as many micro-fiction stories and short-form poems as we want, and we may gain top stories for them. Micro Fiction also would be a great medium for a serial.

I hope this has given you a little food for thought. These are my own opinions so there is no right or wrong here and you may completely disagree with all I say, but it would be a worrying world if we all thought in the same way.

The music is "MICRO" By Davis-D