{"id":22612,"date":"2020-05-02T12:56:49","date_gmt":"2020-05-02T16:56:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=22612"},"modified":"2020-05-02T12:56:54","modified_gmt":"2020-05-02T16:56:54","slug":"working-in-the-small","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/working-in-the-small\/","title":{"rendered":"Working in the Small"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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

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<\/em>? Am I a miniaturist, or do I paint with a big brush? And, for that matter, do any <\/em>authors typically think of themselves in these terms? Or is it all just a critic’s shorthand for the endpoints of a continuum…?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A couple years ago, in my annual mid-June “Potpourri” post<\/a>, 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<\/em> 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This year, I promised myself I wouldn’t get sucked in — a promise I kept… sort of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 micro<\/em>fiction contest<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aside from the word-count ceiling, to meet the contest requirements each story must meet several other requirements, as I described the other day<\/a>. 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.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yesterday afternoon, I posted the first<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(And for the curious: today’s prompt is: romance genre (crap…!)<\/em>; required word “price”; required action “searching the files.”)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Microfiction: 'Working in the Small'","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[183,38,4949,4701,250,5,5128,4878],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-22612","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-everyday-life","7":"category-backwards","8":"category-retirement","9":"category-my-photography","10":"category-art","11":"category-06_writing","12":"category-flash-and-microfiction","13":"category-fiction","14":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-5SI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22612"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22680,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22612\/revisions\/22680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}