Microfiction?

Short stories for free?!

Yes! It’s true! Check us out at https://www.tiktok.com/@dawnsbrookpress

A few weeks back I posted about our Tiktok channel, and trying to figure out what to do with it. A friend suggested… well, telling stories. And that solution was simple and elegant. After all, I’m a writer, right? So for the last several weeks I’ve begin posting five-part microfiction, one part for each weekday.

You can click the link and view the first three stories so far. I’ve already recorded the next week’s story. It’ll start Monday!

But if you watch them… you’ll notice that they’re… well, they’re stories. That’s for sure. But this is a totally different form of storytelling compared to, say, writing novels.

The first big difference is the length. I’ve got maybe 200 words per part in Tiktok. That makes one week’s worth of storytelling essentially one piece of flash fiction (usually 1000 words total or less). It’s generally regarded as a real challenge to write a whole narrative—not just a single scene, but an entire story—in only 1000 words. But Tiktok makes it even harder. It’s not one 1000-word story. It’s five 200-parts that make up a story. That greatly alters the pacing of the entire thing.

And the pacing is another big difference. I need to advance the story as well as create some sort of cliffhanger every 200 words… at most. And really, I should aim for less words. That kind of pacing is brutal! Think of how long a chapter is in a novel. Now imagine each chapter being only 200 words. That’s incredibly hard to keep up that kind of pace!

A third difference? I’m not writing these stories. I’m telling them. Verbally. With spoken words. While I can edit these recordings after the fact, I’ve chosen not to. That means that you’re essentially seeing a rough draft. Kind of. I do write out an outline of what I’m planning each week, and I do revise that. I practice the story, but once I record it… that’s it.

What works as spoken word doesn’t always work as written word, and vice versa. So I’m learning there, too.

Essentially, these stories are an experiment in a different form of storytelling for me. I’d love some feedback. What I’ve gotten on the app itself is generally pretty positive. I’m hoping to improve as time goes on, learning the different pacing and length and so on. And in the meantime…

Well, time for more stories!