Week Seven Writing Assignment
You have from last week your formal writing assignments for the remainder of the term. For this week, you will compose some Microficton and Nanofiction and work on your short story and final project.
First of all, read what Pamille Renshaw has to say about "The Essentials of Micro Fiction"; what she has to say will help you with your particular experiments--and the compression will help with your other writing for the remainder of the term and into the future.
Read what Pamille shares, for you will create a story of exactly 55 words, or Nanofiction: go to this web site for a discussion of nanofiction and to read some fine examples--just scroll down.
You will also write one piece or more of Hyperfiction, which is exactly ten words long.
As usual, post your work on the discussion thread and send your work to me on link in the Assignments for Week Seven--as always in one document.
Pamille discusses Microfiction, Nanofiction, and Hyperfiction.
Here is what Andres Looney writes at his web site about Nanofiction:
Nanofiction by Andrew Looney
One of my favorite kinds of fiction, both to create and to consume, is the very short story. A few years ago I picked up a slim volume of such stories, edited by Jerome Stern, entitled Micro Fiction, in which each story was no more than 250 words. More recently, I got another volume of super short stories that takes the challenge one step further, limiting each story to exactly 55 words. This book, entitled The World's Shortest Stories, edited by Steve Moss, sets down the rules for 55 word stories as such: each story must contain the following four elements: 1.) a setting, 2.) one or more characters, 3.) conflict, and 4.) resolution. Plus of course, the whole thing can only be 55 words long, not counting the title, which must be no more than 7 words long. (There are also some technical details about what really constitutes a word, but I won't bore you with those here.)
Inspired by the challenge of creating an entertaining short story in such a small number of words, I started writing tiny stories of my own. I've written enough of them now - and had so much fun doing it - that I've decided to try to post a new one every week. And thus was born a new featurette, which I'm calling Nanofiction, since these stories are even shorter than those in the Microfiction category. I'll be following the rules set forth by Steve Moss so that I can submit my stories for his next anthology, but I'm adding one more rule of my own: since these stories will be featured in the left hand column of the WWN webzine, and vertical space there is at a premium, all Nanofiction entries will be formatted as a single paragraph.
Last week, you actually wrote some Microfiction, for your Fun With Words exercise required you to write around 500 words or less.
Remember that Microfiction requires exactly 55 works, so use as much poetic condensing as possible--use figural language to pack the language. And, of course, have a lot of fun.
What counts as a word according to Pamille Renshaw:
1. If you can find the word in a dictionary, the word counts.
2. Hyphenated words cannot count as single words. Here "gray-green eyes" is three words.
3. The story's title does not count in the word count but cannot be more than seven words long.
4. Contractions count as single words.
5. An initial counts as a word. An acronym such as NASA counts as one word.
6. Numbers count as words whether as numerals or words. Therefore, 21 is one word but Twenty-one is 2 words.
7. Punctuation does not count as a word so use it.
Now have fun with our two stories, one exactly 55 words long and another 10 words long.
Remember what Linda Beckstead writes about what each story must contain:
1. A story must contain these elements: setting, character(s), conflict, and resolution.
2. All stories must happen someplace--a physical place, another planet, someone's mind.
3. Characters can be anything: people, animals, and microbes.
4. Conflict: Something has to HAPPEN. The friends argue, the plant dies, the wolf waits, which leads the reader to...
5. The outcome: A moral isn't necessary and the conflict does not need to be resolved, but the reader is eventually brought to an ending. But what the resolution means is that someone must have learned something whether it is the characters or the reader.
Use your imagination and share the fun. Remember, too, your rhetorical tools with which you have worked these past weeks.
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