Working in the Small

[Image: “#everydaybandw 699 (2019-08-26),” by John E. Simpson; original in my SmugMug gallery. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

I’ve never thought about my fiction in terms of its scale — its genre (if any), sure; its word count, of course (one must at least feign practicality, even if one seldom practices it)… But are my stories, y’know, sweeping? Am I a miniaturist, or do I paint with a big brush? And, for that matter, do any authors typically think of themselves in these terms? Or is it all just a critic’s shorthand for the endpoints of a continuum…?

A couple years ago, in my annual mid-June “Potpourri” post, I described a writing contest I’d been participating in that year. For that contest, whose three-round timeline sprawled across five or six months, entrants in each round had to compose a short story of N words or fewer, in a particular fictional genre (mystery, romance, etc.), on a given subject, and within a particular period of time. The maximum word counts and times-to-write were shared by everyone in a given round, and both went down as the contest went on: ranging from a maximum 2,500 words, written over eight days, for Round 1, to 1,500 words and 24 hours, for Round 3. Of the 4,000 entrants at the start, I placed sixth overall. This sufficiently swelled my self-regard that I entered the 2019 edition of the same contest… with a much more humbling outcome: I wiped out in the first round.

This year, I promised myself I wouldn’t get sucked in — a promise I kept… sort of.

Because, you see, I remain on the mailing list for the contest organizers, an outfit named NYC Midnight LLC. They’ve been running writing competitions since 2002 — short stories, screenplays, and so on, pretty much year round, contest after contest. And this year they added a variation which seems tailored to a quarantined-at-home-and-retired-to-boot writer’s context: a 100-hundred word microfiction contest.

I suspect the number of entrants for this one to be orders of magnitude larger; a hundred-word maximum, for aspiring writers who are confined at home all around the world, will most likely prove just too tempting a target to ignore.

Aside from the word-count ceiling, to meet the contest requirements each story must meet several other requirements, as I described the other day. Also as I explained then, I threw together a list of over 20,000 “prompts” to be used to practice with during the next week — I have vanishingly little experience “writing small” like this, and I want to be in something like (haha) shape for the first 24-hour round (which begins at 11:59 PM on May 8). (By contrast, my photography — as in this post’s cover image, above — very often drifts small-ward.)

Yesterday afternoon, I posted the first of those practice-session results. Today, and on subsequent days between now and then, I hope to post a new practice micro-story sometime in mid-afternoon. Maybe by Friday it will feel like a ho-hum challenge.

(And for the curious: today’s prompt is: romance genre (crap…!); required word “price”; required action “searching the files.”)