Micro memoir: the love child of micro fiction and memoir

You’ve likely heard of micro fiction, a cousin of flash (separated only by word count–micro is shorter). You no doubt have read a memoir or two. But micro memoir? You may be wondering what strange hybrid has entered the arena. Don’t be scared. Micro memoir employs the best attributes and conventions of micro fiction and memoir to tell a true story in a compressed/distilled format to reveal something larger about a person, place or relationship.

To understand micro memoir, let’s look at the components of the two genres that have inspired this exciting emergent form.

What is micro fiction?

• Unique genre of storytelling that employs extreme brevity – stories typically under 500 words 

• Omits exposition, often beginning at the climax

• Has one or only a few characters

• Works with gaps to reveal information (what’s not said)

• Experiences a narrative arc (sometimes off the page) or some kind of conflict/crisis

• Often pivots from an obvious ending

• Trusts the reader

• Reveals new perspectives, appreciation and significance on the seemingly ordinary

• Is very well edited

What is memoir?

• Factual stories of someone’s life – a window

• An author narrating her/his/their story

• Non-fiction literary writing

• Most often written in the first person

• Generally focuses on a period of life, not the whole life

• Often a life-changing, pivotal moment (but doesn’t have to be)

• A time from which the writer can offer new a perspective 

• Discovery of truth and growth for writer

• Reliant on memory, which is subjective, but the author should still aim for historical accuracy/context

Still not sure? Here are some excellent examples of micro memoir:

(from Twice Not Shy: One hundred short short stories, ed. Laura Keenan and Linda Martin)

The night feels darker in the Pilbara and the stars shine so much brighter. You don’t realise how much light pollution affects the night sky until you are further south. The Pilbara is where the Milky Way kisses the naked eye and the smoke of the fire caresses your skin. The smell of the saltwater breeze and the sound of the waves crashing in the distance is hypnotising. After the sun sets and you’re no longer scorched by the heat, your mind starts to drift into the never-ending void of stars that cloak the night sky. You ignore the scratches on your legs from chasing wildlife through the bush. Alan Jackson plays through the speakers and the voices of your loved ones yarn away with no worries of western civilisation. No thought of the past or future, just right there in the moment, the spinifex flowing in the wind for miles on end. The thought of leaving this place aches my heart. I know I’ve outgrown this town, but I’ll never outgrow this land. The dry heat, like you just opened your oven door, is balanced by the cold bulldust, soft as feathers. 

(from The House on Mango Street, Vintage edition, 2009)

In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy colour. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing. It was my great-grandmother’s name and now it is mine. She was a horse woman too, born like me in the Chinese year of the horse—which is supposed to be bad luck if you’re born female—but I think this is a Chinese lie because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don’t like their women strong.

My great-grandmother. I would’ve liked to have known her, a wild horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn’t marry. Until my great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off. Just like that, as if she were a chandelier. That’s the way he did it. And the story goes she never forgave him. She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn’t be all the things she wanted to be. Esperanza. I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window.

At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made out of a softer something, like silver, not quite as thick as sister’s name—Magdalena—which is uglier than mine. Magdalena who at least can come home and become Nenny. But I am always Esperanza. I would like to baptise myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees. Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X. Yes. Something like Zeze the X will do. 

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Five competitions to enter your flash fiction (and why you definitely should) 

by Gillian O’Shaughnessy, guest blogger

Flash fiction is still a niche market when it comes to making money out of your writing. However, there are other ways to potentially make some cash and get your work published. But that’s not the only or even the biggest reason you should think about entering competitions if you’re new to writing flash fiction.

Writing a story is immensely satisfying and an achievement in itself. But if you want to have your work published, it’s only the first step. There are other important aspects of the process you need to get comfortable with. Entering competitions will help you. And if you win or place, that’s a great bonus. The point is, competitions can help you improve your writing and build up publications. In a moment, I’ll give you five places to look at that run reputable, respected competitions, but first, let’s look at how you can both improve your chances of success and your writing at the same time.

Editing

No writer, from Hemingway to Woolf to Winton writes a perfect draft the first time. (Ok I’m sure there’s one but no one likes them). Once you’ve written your story, you must edit it. This is a separate skill in itself. It involves removing the emotional attachment you feel to your work and going over it again with a keen eye to look for areas you can improve. Look for typos obviously. But look more deeply. Is it a story, does something happen? Is the opening the best it can be? Does every word serve its purpose and drive the narrative forward in some way? Does the ending resonate? Get rid of cliches and overused adverbs. Check the rhythm is varied; are all your sentences short or long? Read it aloud. Ask a friend who knows writing and will tell you the truth to check it. If you can find one of these, a) shower them with love and b) don’t be offended when they do offer a critique. You don’t have to take it – and you shouldn’t if it doesn’t feel right to you – but you do have to say thank you and pretty much nothing else is required. 

Polish, polish, polish. 

Submissions

The best part of entering competitions for me is the deadline. I could tweak a story until the end of time. A deadline forces me to work hard to make the story the best it can be and then stop. Then there are the other jewels that submitting your work can offer you. The first is the practice of putting your writing out there. It’s a big step for new writers. But competition entries are usually read blind, so it’s pretty anonymous unless you win or place. So, you can be as shy as you like. The second is you start to learn resilience and this is a big one. Writing is personal and rejections can sting. But every writer gets them and every writer needs to learn to cope and keep writing anyway. Hundreds if not thousands of people enter competitions where maybe only ten or twenty are singled out for accolades. It’s a wonderful validation if you get a mention but if you don’t, well, it isn’t the end of the world. 

Plus, you have three things you didn’t have before: a story you have worked on that is finished to the very best of your ability at that time, experience in submitting your work and thicker skin. 

Submission Guidelines

Every competition will include submission guidelines. You’d think it’s obvious, but as someone who reads for competitions and general journal submissions, you’d be surprised how many people do not do this simple thing. It’s a very easy way to whittle out the duds when you’re judging. Guidelines will include things like word count (yes, it does matter if it’s one or two words over the limit), whether previously published stories are ok to enter (yes, it does count if you published it on your blog or Facebook) and things like themes, fonts, spacing and how to enter, whether it’s through a website, email or a submission platform like Submittable. Very important – if the judging is blind you must not place anything on your story that identifies you, including your name or contact details. 

Simply speaking, you must follow the guidelines for each particular competition; if you don’t, you will be disqualified. It doesn’t hurt to check out the website more widely, as often they’ll include stories from past winners and interviews with judges who will tell you what they look for. 

Five competitions to start you off

Like everything else where money is involved, competitions can be rorted, so especially when you’re starting out, be a little careful. If the organisers are charging $25 an entry and only offering $100 dollars in prize money, that’s clearly a money-making exercise. Here are five respected competitions that will judge your work fairly.

Reflex Flash Fiction Award

Based in the UK, this one is always open for stories between 180 and 360 words. They have four prizes a year, and first place wins about two-thousand Australian dollars. They publish all longlisted entries online and release a printed anthology each year. See the latest winning story announced in August 2022 by Perth writer Megan Anderson, Gone for Some Time, my own winning story in 2020 Mouse , and Barely Casting a Shadow, by Perth writer Alicia Bakewell who won in 2017. I feel like West Australian writers have an edge in this one. It will cost you about nine dollars Australian to enter three stories on their early bird option, plus there’s a pay what you can option if you can’t afford the entry fee. 

Bath Flash Fiction Prize

This is a prestigious competition open internationally run out of the town of Bath in the UK. It is run four times a year and winners are published online and in a printed anthology. The word limit is 300 and first prize is one-thousand UK pounds. 

Retreat West Quarterly Themed

This one is not as lucrative but it’s fun, and they give you a theme to write to with a limit of 500 words. It costs 8 pounds or $13 Australian dollars to enter and the prize is $200 UK pounds. It doesn’t attract as many entries as Bath or Reflex so your chances are higher. I like Retreat West because they offer lots of free writing resources (and charged services also), plus they run a range of writing comps, including one for short stories. You will need a submittable account for this one. 

Furious Fiction

This one is run by the Australian Writers Centre and it’s free! You are given several prompts you must include and 55 hours to write your story. The first prize is $500 and they publish the best stories online. It’s quarterly, and the next one starts on Friday, December 2nd. If you want to enter, sign up for their newsletter. Be aware you will get a lot of emails about their writing courses as well. 

Writing WA Love to Read Local Flash Fiction Competition

This local competition shouldn’t be missed. It’s run once a year during Writing WA’s Love to Read Local Week, and submissions open in March for about a month. Entrants are asked to write a 100-word flash story based on any WA book cover as inspiration. First prize is a $500 voucher from Raine Square and the winning stories are published on Writing WA’s website and included in the Raine Square Short Story Dispenser near Perth train station. It’s judged by Laura Keenan and Linda Martin from Night Parrot Press. 

Finally, if you want to find out about more competitions for flash fiction, this document from Betas and Bludgers is an invaluable resource. It includes a list of reputable competitions all year round, including deadlines.

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In praise of the shorter narrative form

by Susan Midalia, guest blogger

Having written three short story collections and two novels in the past 16 years, I’ve now discovered a new writing passion: fiction under 500 words. I’ve had some pieces published in journals and anthologies, and I’m delighted that Night Parrot Press is publishing my first collection of short short stories, Miniatures, in July of this year.

         What I’ve learned in the process is that writing in the shorter narrative form is stylistically challenging: every word must be the right one placed in the right order. Readers of novels or even long short stories (think Nam Le or Jhumpa Lahiri, for example) tend to gloss over the occasional stylistic glitch – a cliché, a rhythmically awkward sentence, mangled syntax – and keep reading for the pleasure of the plot and the development of characters. By contrast, a short story or piece of flash or micro fiction leaves a writer with nowhere to hide. Readers will more readily notice stylistic infelicities and begin to lose faith in the writer’s ability to use language precisely, incisively, inventively. I certainly do as a reader! 

         I’ve also learned that writing shorter narratives entails negotiating competing generic requirements: the need to be both brief and resonant, economical and evocative. This means creating the illusion of a life beyond the relatively few words on the page by using the strategies of suggestion, including symbolism, metaphor, imagery, juxtaposition and compressed language. 

          Here’s an example of the art of suggestion. It’s the opening sentence to Claire Keegan’s wonderful short story ‘Antarctica’:

         ‘Every time the happily married woman went away, she wondered how it would feel to sleep with another man.’ 

         Those nineteen words suggest a great deal about the woman in question. Consider, for example, the implications of ‘every time’ (instead of ‘whenever’): the heavily stressed words ‘every time’ suggest the persistence of her desire. Similarly, the words ‘how it would feel’ (instead of ‘what it would be like’) imply her desire not only for sex but for intimate touch, even emotional connection. All of which complicates the description of her as ‘the happily married woman.’ The sentence is also a brilliant example of linguistic compression: Keegan makes relatively few words – and they’re all simple ones – do a lot of work. Her sentence also provides readers with the pleasure of interpretation. Like all memorable examples of shorter narrative forms, Keegan’s opening words respect our intelligence; they require us to be active co-creators of the text instead of mere passive consumers. We need to read between the lines, as it were; to infer and deduce; to fill in the gaps.

         And now: let me turn that opening sentence into a complete two-sentence story:

         ‘Every time the happily married woman went away, she wondered how it might feel to sleep with another man. Every time she went away, her husband fell to the floor and wept.’

         What we are given is a flash of knowledge, a glimpse of a marriage in crisis.  The hints of a wife’s dissatisfaction; the pathos of a husband’s unhappiness, enacted in the ‘dying fall’ with which the story ends. There is so much we don’t know, of course, about the couple, but that’s precisely the point: a reminder that life is always a contest between the known and the unknown, between the spoken and the silent. As well, given the fact that I’ve used only 32 words, I’ve given myself little room to move. To use an analogy from clothing: if short story writing is the art of compression, then writing a story of less than 500 words can feel like wearing a corset. It’s a really tight fit, but a writer can use the constraint to create a pleasing shape. 

         Short short stories can also be audacious; they can surprise readers, catch them unawares. A writer can, for example, create a plot ‘twist’ at the end: a final sentence, even a single word, that undermines or questions all that has preceded it. Surprise can also be created through unexpected juxtapositions or rapid shifts in tone. My story ‘Bright Pink Flowers’ (in the Night Parrot Press anthology Once) begins with the voice of a curmudgeonly man sitting in a busy shopping mall and ends on an unexpected note of pathos when he recalls a sorrowful moment in his past.  The extreme brevity of the story – it’s only 240 words long – serves to heighten the nature of grief: how it can return to us, unbidden, in the most unlikely of circumstances. 

         Stories of less than 500 words can also be engagingly playful. My story ‘The ABC of Female Destiny’ (in Twice) plays with the genre of a Child’s Reader to sketch the generational changes in ideas of femininity. Even more playfully, a story in my forthcoming collection Miniatures consists of a title followed by a blank page. That blank page doesn’t mean absence; it’s an invitation to the reader to reflect. As well, the quick-fire pace of a short short story is admirably suited to script writing. A script is an economical way of suggesting conflict between characters, and/or of ending with a sense of miscommunication or irresolution. 

         Finally, and crucially, a short short story should never ‘explain’ its meanings; it’s a waste of precious words, as well as condescending to readers. Nor should it be merely ‘flashy’: overly obvious and gimmicky, like a bad Elvis Presley imitator. Actually, make that any Elvis Presley imitator.  

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How to write and edit flash fiction

by Laura Keenan and Linda Martin

What is flash fiction?

Flash fiction is its own unique form of storytelling. It is a genre of stories that are typically under 1,000 words. Flash fiction shares the same attributes of the novel and short story in that it has a beginning, middle and end, along with tension and subtext; but it compresses these concepts. Flash shares large, often complex ideas in a small space. Because of the space constraint, flash asks for introspection by the writer and interpretation by the reader. What is left out in flash is as important as what is retained. This is why in good flash stories, the writer and reader will meet halfway. 

What’s so great about flash?

Flash moves the bar on a fully complete story. Flash might begin with a standard story but then will pivot away from an obvious ending, landing in a new and surprising way. Flash stories reveal new perspectives and angles on things that might seem ordinary or insignificant. With carefully constructed gaps and omissions, flash trusts the reader to make their own conclusion, to piece together what happened before and consider where the story goes after. It leaves space for the reader. 

What is demanding about flash?

Flash fiction asks the writer (and reader) to focus. As the writer, you don’t have the luxury to meander like you might in a novel or a short story. Because of structural constraint, flash demands the writer to be braver and more inventive. It often draws on literary devices such as metaphor, symbolism, metonymy and synecdoche. The flash writer should try to avoid using the same themes and tropes, or their stories will feel repetitive. In other words, the flash writer’s repertoire should be large to avoid trotting out the same themes and styles over and over again. Flash asks writers to pull a different animal out of the hat each time.

How do I begin my flash?

A great way to begin a flash story is to think of a question. Why does that neighbour across the road intrigue me? Why can’t I let go of that incident that happened at work? What was the story behind that conversation I overheard? And what on earth did my partner mean by that text? Look online for prompts. The online community is huge – particularly on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Join a flash fiction writing workshop run by Night Parrot Press!

How do I write my flash?

Begin by reading as much flash by other writers as you possibly can, all the while thinking about your own story. When you have found your question, ask the ‘what ifs?’ around it. Maybe go for a coffee and observe people. Imagine them in different settings. Ask yourself questions about them. When you’ve answered questions, you’re ready to begin writing your story. At the end of your first draft, ask if the ending feels complete. Does it carry an arc? Is there too much background? Does it feel too ‘preachy’? Is the story just a scene or an event, or is it a scene or event that carries deeper emotional and intellectual meaning, that forces the reader to ask other questions? Try not to be too obvious in your story. Don’t explain the meaning to the reader. Be ambiguous, but not too ambiguous. Does it offer a different perspective? Strive for balance.

How do I edit and revise my flash?

Editing and revision is so important in writing flash. Just because it might be quick to write and you’ve met the word count, it doesn’t mean the story is finished. Consider some of these editing tips and questions:

–           Is it too obvious?

–           Is it too directive?

–           Is it too ambiguous?

–           Have I over-explained the story? 

–           Is the last line like a neat bow — could it be cut?

–           What’s necessary in the story and what isn’t?

–           Have I left bread crumbs, or did I drop the whole loaf?

–           Have I shared the story with a trusted reader or writing group?

–           Have I trusted the reader enough?

–           Has every word, every sentence earned its place?

If you’d like to learn more about writing flash fiction, check out our creative writing workshops here!