We Like Short Shorts
Why Medium is the perfect place for microfiction
As a boy, I had a standard procedure whenever I got home from the library with my latest science fiction anthology. I would go through the Contents page and do a quick calculation of which stories were the shortest, and start with them.
Short stories have always been my favourite literary format, and as well as the sci-fi greats of Asimov, Heinlein and Bradbury, I was also a fan of more mainstream literary figures such as Saki, Runyon and Heinrich Boll.
From the sci-fi crowd I was mainly gleaning ideas (the prose was often pedestrian), while in the others I was appreciating a mood, a humorous quandary, or an insight into the human condition, skilfully sketched in words.
And the briefer those words, the happier I was.
This was almost as much of a guilty pleasure then as my Elephant Men comics are now. Teachers drummed it into us that long form novels were the apex of civilisation — the only truly worthy aspiration for the literary artist.
And the novel format continues to be the goal of most writers.
But the short form works rather well here on Medium. Partly that’s because of the limited attention span of the audience. Who else checks the estimated reading time before they start on an article? I’m surely not the only one.
Two to four minutes? That’s not going to put too much of a hole in my day. Ten minutes and upwards? Who are you, the Dalai Lama?
Most of my attempts at novels are really just short stories and vignettes glued together. So a lot of my early Medium posts were just standalone novel extracts. It was probably the work of Delta B. McKenzie and Starkey which proved to me that newly-written short fiction could pack a punch, and didn’t need to be linked to the stories before and after.
So now I get to indulge in storymaking as briefly as I want. In most cases the three to four minute read is just the exploration of a simple question that’s on my mind at the time.
- What if Stonehenge were just a giant toddler’s building blocks?
- What if flies were trying to communicate when they fly in zigzags?
- What if aliens were once here, but cleaned up after themselves?
- What if mermaids exist, and all fishermen are in on the secret?
It’s a common assertion that fiction gets a raw deal on Medium. And now that reading time determines income, both poetry and microfiction are unlikely to be lucrative for the writer. But if what you are seeking is a platform for your scribbles, there’s nowhere better. There are dozens of publications catering for short fiction, and at least one specialising in Speculative Microfiction (thanks to Alex Kilcannon for the pointer).
My articles about Medium attract more claps than anything else, for reasons which are completely opaque to me.
Outside of that niche, my shorter, standalone pieces have gained more attention than any lengthier monologues or stories. Poetry seems to gain claps in inverse proportion to its length. So you may gain no financial benefit from your haikus, but you are assured of an audience.
The same goes for scraps of prose. My little joke about Neanderthals meeting Homo Sapiens is a one-minute read which took about five minutes to write, but got far more readers and claps than something I would consider a better story.
So, the lesson has been learned. Compress, distil and pack as much as possible into as short a space as possible. You can trust me. I promise I won’t ask you to commit too much of your time.
We all know how you feel about commitment.
Many thanks for reading!
As if the embedded links weren’t enough, here are some Medium-related pieces!