Why A Vocal Microfiction Is Like A Ramones Song

Introduction

In the seventies I remember reading a review of a Ramones album saying that Ramones songs were like Smarties, you couldn't just have one, you had to have the whole tube.

I thought this was an almost perfect analogy as I love The Ramones and their songs and I love Smarties too and still do to this day. The thing is, at this point, I could submit this as a Vocal microfiction story, even though it is an article and contains observations on actual situations, although at the end of this article,

I will add links to all my microfiction challenge entries which I was too embarrassed to share any but the first one in "Great Incantations: A group dedicated to Writing Challenges" because I saw myself as just being lazy. I eventually shared one or two as responses when others asked for shared stories.

Thoughts On The Nature Of Microfiction

A lot of people have pushed the "Less Is More" maxim in support of microfiction, but as Frasier Crane once said, "If Less Is More, Just think How Much More, More Would Be!!"

Think about Twitter, your tweet used to have to fit into 140 characters, now it is 280 but I often run out and have to trim things in order to be able to tweet.

That is the brilliant challenge of microfiction, write a complete story, in a limited number of words. The devil in me tells me I am lazy when I write microfiction or a poem because it does not have that many words, but as an example, I wrote a very simple poem last night but after getting the idea it still took me over an hour to put it together, so am I really being lazy?

My first entry was chosen by Vocal as a Top Story and was a slightly comic piece which people enjoyed.

I loved Dana Crandel's use of microfiction to create a serial. It could have been a single story, but releasing it in serial form makes it easy to read and obviously, Dana can create a pillar post containing links to all the stories when the serial is finished.

The series starts here:

Microfiction gives you the opportunity to help you get over writing blocks as writing as little as fifty words is probably something that everyone can do, even if it is just to write down that they can't think of anything to write about. This paragraph in itself has enough words for a Vocal Microfiction entry, so you know that you can do it.

My only slight worry is that Vocal dropping the word count completely from fiction opens up that community to spammers and AI scammers but the real creators will ignore these and hopefully Vocal will put procedures in place to deal with them quickly.

I hope the next Microfiction challenge has some kind of theme to it, as I prefer prompts combined with writing forms, but that is my own preference and I am sure many will disagree with me.

Conclusion

So those are my thoughts, observations and ideas on the Microfiction format. I would love to hear your thoughts too in the comments on here or on Facebook.

Remember Microfiction is just one writing format of all that we can use to create a Vocal Story.

These are my half-dozen entries to the first Vocal Microfiction Challenge and each one contains a link to the actual challenge. In theory, this could have been combined into a single Vocal publication although they are all on unrelated themes.

The first one was the Top Story.