What Makes Short Short Fiction Tick?

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Mike Geiger:
…What short short stories have in common is that they all have something absent, causing us to read the subtext. Since the story is so short, it forces open interpretation over the backstory. Yet a proper short short never makes us feel like we are missing something. At the end of [Pamela Painter’s] “The New Year,” the narrator takes one last picture of the ham as it floats out to the Pacific and says, “In this picture, you can’t tell which of us is missing.” We are simply left to assume what is missing.
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Faith Wally:
From one Micro Short entitled “Last Supper in the Cabinet Mountains," a three paragraph long story, I found these [verbs]: read, broke, passed, poured, rummaged, dragging, smudged, leaned, starting, watched, eat, drink, ate, drank, raised, glanced, tangle, dripped, screeched, broke, understood, bleed, trickle, looked, gave, scratched, carried, wadded, buried, say, knocked, sprawled, clutching, flew. And hell, I probably missed a few...
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Matt Gammertsfelder:
Functionally, I believe a short-short story is similar to a joke; both are told by one person to another for their mutual enjoyment. The ultimate success or failure of a joke depends on its punch line, the end, the culmination of the telling. Similarly, a short-short story’s effectiveness and enjoyableness depends on its final sentence. Each spends the entirety of itself building toward this conclusion, thus the conclusion is the reason for its existence.
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Sharon Cebula:
These laser-cut moments are like memories, slices of time preserved in a synapse. Like borrowing a pen and suddenly remembering a childhood crush, not realizing the smell of the ink has triggered it. Linda Brewer drops us into the moment of “20/20” by leading with an assumption of lapsed time: “By the time they reached Indiana, Bill realized that Ruthie, his driving companion, was incapable of theoretical debate.” From this one sentence, we already know a great deal about the setting and the two main characters.
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Rosie Heindel:
When I write short pieces, I write as though I am recording a dream. I don’t think about elements of the craft because it is all new to me. I just put down what comes out and hope that it is good. I don’t know what’s going to happen when I begin. Many times, I get sucked into my created world and get really irritated when I have to come back to reality. When I edit, I look mostly at trying to make the language sound good. I tend to have a wild pace, but I don’t do it on purpose. That’s just how they come out. I enjoy writing these pieces so much. They’re like drinking a hot cup of cocoa by the fire on a cold snowy day. They make me feel warm and gratified.
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Beth Mandl:
Short short fiction has come to remind me of the core of a cabbage. When I was a kid my dad would make a Yugoslavian dish called valushkas. One of its main ingredients was cabbage and us kids would flock around his legs when he was cleaning the cabbage so we could get dibs on the core. In our years of culinary experience we had decided that the core of the cabbage was the piece de resistance and many a fight was waged over it. So why do I think short short fiction is like that core? Ok, here it goes: think of the head of cabbage as a short short fiction. It has a beginning and an end, character development and loads of backstory. Now, with each piece of cabbage that you tear away you arte making the story shorter and shorter until all you have left is the core. The best part...
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Brittany Muffet:
…[Some] microfictions feature an event as the most crucial element; if characters inform scenes presented, the characters serve as dimensions of the landscape, atmosphere, or state of the on goings. In Judith Ortiz Cofer’s “Kennedy in the Barrio,” the narrator describes the implications Kennedy’s presidency had on a Puerto Rican community. The narrator recalls, “Two years and ten months later I would run to Puerto Habana on a cold Friday afternoon to find a crowd of people around a television set. Many of them, men and women both, were sobbing like children. ‘Dios mio, Dios mio,’ they kept wailing.” Not the narrator’s, but the community’s response to the president’s assassination impacts the reader. The narrator serves as a lens through which the reader views the event, much as the television is the object through which the crowd confronts a life-changing reality. In essence, the news on the television screen consumes the crowd, the narrator, and the reader alike as the images on it depict a tragedy that resists additional dialog.
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Katherine Schweitzer-Carney:
Sound creates flow like water passing through a river bed. Sometimes it flows smooth between the banks. Other times it must pass over a boulder in its path, or maybe even around a downed tree. The point is water has to flow just the same and to the same place. The same end.
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As writers, we must reach that same end, as well, and it is up to us individually to decide how we are getting there while keeping the flow steady.
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So what’s the moral of this short-short on words? It’s simple: Each and every word must matter. If this isn’t happening, hit delete and try again.
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Chris Bair:
In Heinrich Boll’s “The Laugher,” the economy in the story is that the character himself becomes both the story and the plot. How much is known about him besides the work he does and how people see him? Yet these are vital parts of the story to explain the dreadfully unfunny life of a professional laugher. There’s no reason to show examples of his laughing abilities—the story does well with its device of glancing over the types of jobs he has held as a professional laugher. There’s little reason to explore more of how the character came to be a laugher, or someone getting him to laugh on his own.
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The economical nature of the story combines plot and story into the character and designs the tale around an interesting man’s profession. This would be impossible to hold in any longer work without padding the yarn with examples of his job, more of his early life and perhaps interaction with someone with a normal job on how much he really envies it, rather than simply telling the reader he does.
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Jimmy Bigley:
No author is ever like any other author. We just write! Some are better at describing a certain event and yet others are better at character development, while still others are good doing both. The size of the story doesn’t really have a bearing on the depth of the tale as long as the author can restrict his language in a way that strengthens the flow of the story.
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Matthew Meduri:
…There is an immediacy we are faced with given the confines of this [snapshot] approach that grounds us in the story. The plot is so small or even nonexistent that we do not necessarily read to find out what will happen next. We read to know more of the character’s thoughts and feelings. Hopefully, each one of these types of stories will give us something to consider when we are through. This calls for a theme, an idea, or an image that will linger in our minds. This is salient in the mind of the narrator as well. It allows us to possibly contemplate something of greater meaning and even call for repeated reading.