Flash Fiction/Microfiction

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Anyone else write this?

I've decided to write at least one a day. If anyone is interested in reading it, my Tumblr is here.

Worldbuilding I enjoy. Coming up with settings isn't a problem for me, coming up with plots is. I'm hoping this will improve my ability to do the latter.

It feels like reading "if on a winter's night, a traveller...", By italo calvino; a post-modern experiment in which each chapter is the beginnjng of a story, which leads to the next (in one the protagonist opens a book and starts reading, in the next (which could be the beginning of that book) someone starts telling a story, and so on).

The hard part is to make it beyond a beginning

It's just partial fictional scenes?

Not quite. Very, very short stories, but they're still stories.

People tell them all the time in the form of jokes.

Stories have plots. I read your tumblr, and some of the entries have no discernible plot.

I love reading microfiction. It's quick to consume and it can be very interesting thematically. I would try writing more but I either don't know what to write about or I like the idea too much to limit it to something so short.
This is one of my favorites:
http://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html

The great thing is, it's only a couple of hundred words. You don't need a fully fledged story idea to write it, just a fragment.

I'm using it both to get into a solid habit of writing, and also to explore ideas I want to flesh out further into longer stories.

To be fair, OP kind of already 'fessed up to that!

Actually, I struggle with writing short stories because the modern short story is NOT plot-driven. The majority of short stories I've read from the past few decades are not a sequence of scenes in which a plot is enacted. They're a sequence of scenes that explore an emotion, an idea, an image, a setting, or a situation. Often there is literally no plot, just a couple of scenes where nothing really changes. When there is a plot, it takes a back seat to the basically static concept around which the story is is built.

I've seen this both in SF/fantasy and in generall fiction. I think it dates back to James Joyce and his "epiphany" idea. He wrote a lot of short stories in which all that happens is that the central character has a realisation or "epiphany" about the nature of their life. This approach has taken over short-story writing to a ridiculous degree.

I guess flash fiction can take the whole "epiphany" thing and cut out a whole lot of bloated artsy verbiage, leaving you with just the core of the situation.

I'm currently reading 'If On A Winter's Night - A Traveler' which can also be known as a work of 'Metafiction' (LINK). I've read metafictional works, and seen films with metafictional structures e.g., 1992 'The Player.' Metafiction can be intriguing.

LINK: On Metafiction, and List of Metafictional Works: Modern and Contemporary works. Works listed alphabetically by author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_m ... rary_works

Good book review for 'If on A Winter's Night - A Traveler.'
https://musewithmeblog.com/2019/02/26/b ... o-calvino/

I keep having what I call Kilgore Trout ideas.

Kurt Vonnegut started out writing fairly straightforward SF. Later on, he introduced Kilgore Trout*, a recurring character who was a pulp SF writer, and Vonnegut included lots of single-paragraph summaries of his stories. Enough of them to have kept a real-life pulp SF writer going for years; usually rather schlocky and based around a single concept. Yeah, I come up with those. They never get any further.

*I keep wondering if the name was a swipe at Theodore Sturgeon...

I Read and enjoyed three of Vonnegut's books mentioned in the LINK on Metafictional Works - Vonnegut's works were mainly from the 1970s, Yet 'Timequake' was published in 1997.

I'm impressed that Vonnegut's works achieved ample popularity in the 1970s - that is the metafiction or post-modernist works rarely achieve even the smallest degrees of popularity.

Anybody feel that the time is ripe for metafiction to make a comeback of sorts?

Any potential ideas which might become cult-classic(s)?

Bumping-up this discusison-thread - as this thread has a discusison on the Postmodern genre.

Author Kurt Vonnegut was a memorable author who proved that Postmodern works can achive ample popularity - a rarity for a genre which is often viewed as too intellectual to understand.

There is but 1 plot in all of literature: "Something changes, people react, conflict ensues."

Six basic plots in literature is a notable guideline (STORY). Seventeen, and even thirty-six basic plots in literature are other notable guidelines.

STORY: The Six Basic Plots and the Dramatic Curve -Kurt Vonnegut’s Research Mapped onto Life’s Dramatic Curve.

https://writingcooperative.com/the-six- ... 310689b091

Reading Italo Calvino's 'If On a Winter's Night - A Traveler' for the third time. Does anybody feel that Calvino was on the Autism Spectrum?

It was a dark and stormy night.