A brief look at mini-masterpieces
The Age
Saturday October 31, 2009
There's never been a better time for the ultra-short story, writes Jane Sullivan. ONE of Ernest Hemingway's favourites among his short stories was: "For sale: baby shoes: never used." It packs a lot of poignancy into six words, but Gertrude Stein beat him with a shorter story: "She stayed away longer."We're used to very short poems, the haiku being perhaps the supreme example. But despite the Hemingway and Stein examples, very short stories haven't really caught on in a big way €” until the rise of the iPhone and Twitter.Maybe it's the new technology, or maybe it's the new generation's notoriously short attention span, but ultra-short stories are flourishing online. Called micro-fiction or flash fiction, these mini-masterpieces range from 250 words down to six words.Very short memoirs also abound: it seems many writers believe it's possible to contain a whole life in a tiny space. New York writer Amy Hempel laments: "Just once in my life. Oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life." On the website Not Quite What I Was Planning, nine-year-old Hannah Davies offers: "Cursed with cancer. Blessed by friends."With funding from various arts bodies, some home-grown sites are inviting mini-fiction as a way of encouraging and developing young writers. The NSW-based 12words.com.au solicits stories from Australians aged between 15 and 25, with prizes for the top-rated entries. Here's one I like: "Years of police training couldn't prepare Phil for criminals actually yelling 'bang'."Another site, Newcastle-based onefifty.com.au, has published the best results in an e-zine. A micro story has to tell a complete story with a plot, characters, conflict and resolution, says the onefifty site. This means that they have a spare and direct style: adjectives are the first words to be cut. But they can still attain a certain richness of language, because the words have to pack a punch.The mark of a great piece of micro-fiction? "Something memorable is revealed to the reader and this continues to engage the mind long after the story has been left behind."Another project €” which is more about entertainment than engaging the mind €” is boiling down great novels into a summing-up short enough for Twitter. Amid much hype, Penguin signed up two college students to produce Twitterature, a book of 60 literary classics reduced to less than 20 tweets each, full of internet slang.The book is out in November and we've had some previews. Here's Ishmael in Moby Dick: "We set out. Follow @starbuck, @queequeg for long introspective soliloquies on the human soul. Or @tashtego if you like adorable kittens."Writer Tim Collins also had a go at this caper with The Little Book of Twitter, reducing Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot to "Vladimir and Estragon stand next to tree and wait for Godot. Their status is not updated."But when it comes to mini-fiction I'm drawn more to original stories than potted versions of the classics. There's the wry "For sale: Planet. Small human infestation." Or the World's Shortest Horror Story: "The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door."I'm not sure anyone quite equals Hemingway's brief masterpiece, but trust Margaret Atwood to come up with something both caustic and touching for a book of ultra-short fiction put out by Wired magazine: "Longed for him. Got him. Shit."janesullivan.sullivan9@gmail.com
© 2009 The Age
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