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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Found Micro-Fiction

17:48 / 24.08.06

[Mods: I think that this is "literary" enough to go in Books, but I won't contest a move to another forum - Creation? Convo? - if I'm wrong.]

"The great beast was secured by guy wires as its old head, framed in scaffolding, was about to be unbolted."

["The Talk of The Town," The New Yorker, May 6, 1991]

I came across this quote at work (as a citation for "guy wire"), and was immediately struck. The imagery is at once concrete in form (i.e. there is a beast, and it is secured by guy wires, etc.) and completely ambiguous in meaning (i.e. what the chicken-fried hell is going on?). It is a perfect piece of one-sentence fiction, a single epic moment which obviates the need for either exposition or resolution, while tantalizingly hinting at possible legions of both.

The perverse temptation to track down the article and find out what it's "really" talking about is nearly overwhelming, despite the fact that it would almost necessarily ruin everything. I can only suppose that this great beast with the bolted-on head is a metaphor for some kind of machinery, but the story is so much better if we simply take it at face-value: big bolted-together beast submitting (willingly?) to its imminent decapitation.

I find stuff like this a lot, since my job involves a lot of sifting through the citation files - I consider it one of the perks. Anyone else have any to share? The only rules are that a) it should only be a sentence or maybe two, and b) it should be extracted from a pre-existing text and reinvented by its lack of supporting context, and not a deliberate attempt at micro-fiction. (It just occured to me that we often do something similar with "out of context" barbequotes.)

Anyone want to play?

20:26 / 25.08.06

Yes, but nothing's coming immediately to mind. I know I've run into these before.

12:46 / 19.10.06

"He may have in retrospect seemed a little troubled," Watermeier said in an interview early Wednesday morning, shortly after he led investigators to the gruesome scene inside the apartment.

[Walt Philbin, "staff writer" of unspecified newspaper]

Just enough to set the scene, and the suggestion of blackly humorous understatement. All the information you really need for a good (micro) crime drama is there; what actually happened inside the apartment is irrelevant.

17:41 / 02.11.06

This one is more vague than the two above, and in fact was not a full sentence, but a subclause, in the source text. I think it has a kind of stark grandeur on its own, though.

"[T]hey will not be denied their tragedy."

It's a micro-narrative in much the way that the titles of some abstract paintings or pieces of instrumental music are narratives, in which indefinite shapes and sounds are given meaning (or the illusion of meaning) through association with the words. In this instance, the amorphous medium is lexical, drawing on our repository of associations with the word "tragedy," our sense of an unnamed "they," to fill in the form provided by the sentence itself - complex and composite images freed from the limitations of context and empowered by sytax that suggests sense, so that like "pure" music they can inspire or communicate an emotional response without concrete "content."

Or it could be the cold medicine. As you were.

Glenn Close But No Cigar

12:20 / 03.11.06

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

Marquez, 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'.

14:19 / 03.11.06

Wow, how many stories is that, right there? Lovely, thank you.

It makes a difference, I think, taking such a sentence as All There Is, rather than knowing it as an introduction to The Rest of the Story. I picture an anthology, one story per page - a single sentence set starkly in the middle of the page, isolation emphasized by the enormous empty borders.

04:00 / 11.11.06

I'm awfully late to this thread, but I ran across it and thought I'd chime in. In a sense, I think that many of the great first lines of novels belong in this category. And, in my mind, the best first line in postwar American literature:

"She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise."

- Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint

18:04 / 13.11.06

Don't worry, Coffee, it's a slow-growth thread, so you're always right on time.

I like the Roth sentence. I have to admit that I would almost question it as micro-fiction, but for the word "seems", which ambiguates and enriches an otherwise straightforward, if fascinating, statement.

I am reminded of a beautiful micro-story that my wife came across, from a little cardboard children's book called (something like) The Happy Snowman. The entire middle of the book had fallen out, leaving only the pages printed on the inner covers. The remaining text read:

The children built a happy snowman.

Or was it?

18:30 / 13.11.06

And another, plucked from our own Laboratory, back in 2001:

"The brain remains alive for only a few days in its special solution before the machine expires, and another lamprey must die."

-Ben MacIntyre

This is pretty clearly in the same category as the thread-starter (except that this one doesn't offer the tenuous comfort of metaphor).

Glenn Close But No Cigar

12:02 / 15.11.06

This, from John 1:1, is hard to beat:

'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.'

17:25 / 15.11.06

Zahir, what is it in particular that makes that passage work for you as micro-fiction? Just to keep the discussion rolling, you know?

Glenn Close But No Cigar

21:01 / 15.11.06

Well, if the question is 'Zahir, are you a Christian', the answer's no.

What makes it perfect microfiction for me is that it states a ground zero ('in the beginning'), and in so doing suggests a future change to this state. There's also a logical problem to overcome (how can something be both with something, and that thing itself?) which suggests a narrative - maybe a murder mystery, which, in the end, is what the Bible is. I also like the idea that it is a metafiction - a thing composed of words ('the Word'), and thus of something Godlike, that seeks to explain God.

21:52 / 15.11.06

This thread reminded me of the would-be-novelist from Camus´ The Plague. He spent his time thinking about the perfect first sentence for his novel, and that gave him serious writer´s block, and over many years he accomplished to write only a couple of pages.

I don´t know the english translation of that sentence, here´s mine:

"On a beautiful morning in the month of may, an elegant amazon atop a wonderful chestnut mare strode on the blooming avenues of the Bois du Boulogne."

12:21 / 16.11.06

Nicely unpacked, Zahir. I'm still struggling with the level of abstraction a little bit (from the perspective of an out-of-context reading; part of the problem, I think, is that I am familiar with the context, so when I make a conscious effort to strip that away, I don't feel like I'm left with much), but I think I see what you mean.

And Head In A Box, I never thought I'd say this, but you've made me want to go out and get The Plague. I loved it in high school, but I've never gone back to it. The would-be-novelist's sentence is like a haiku.

12:54 / 16.11.06

Funny you're talking about this now, as the other day on LinkMachineGO a link to Wired was posted with a plethora of 6-word stories, inspired by Hemmingway's work: "For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn."

Alan Moore's "Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time" was particularly smile-inducing, but none of the stories come close to the emotional impact of Hemmingway's line. I think what's really impressive is the sheer weight of meaning each word needs to carry in order to get such a meaning out of it. Also brilliant I thought, was Mark Millar's "Broken heart, 45, WLTM disabled man." I think it's incredible how such a short statement can hold so much information and history and meaning.

18:37 / 12.09.07

One day, about a week after the game began, Raoul's heart was badly hurt and he stopped playing and uttered these wild words: "I shan't go to the North Pole!"

[G. Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera, though it's more fun if you forget who "Raoul" is.]

It makes perfect sense in context, but I think it feels more significant without it.