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Writing
Adventures In Micro-fiction
Overcoming my negative first impressions and enjoying a new challenge
When I first started writing on Medium, I had no idea there was such a thing as micro-fiction or flash fiction. Actually, I was pretty ignorant about writing in general. I didn’t know the jargon. Drabble, pantster, WIP, alliteration, protagonist, prose? I thought we were using English here? Thankfully, searching the internet is easy.
My first impression of flash fiction or micro-fiction was not positive. The stories I read seemed to be incomplete. Or people put in difficult situations that ended with an “F-Bomb.” Or they were just plain confusing. These stories didn’t appeal to me.
Then I read a couple of good flash-fiction stories that painted a picture and told a whole story. So I gave it a try and came up with a flash-fiction tale about a flying incident. I posted it, then quickly deleted it. I was still in the skittish, nervous Bambi phase of my Medium experience and worried that it was too heavy for my regular humor readers (all 8 of them.) It sat in my Scrivener file for about a year and a half.
Back in August, one of the writers I follow, Jk Mansi, posted a 50-word micro-fiction story on The Friday Fix. I liked the idea of the story having to be exactly 50…