The secret strings are the means by which all is revealed…
- Microfiction, as prompts;
- Why writing tools like tarot feel a bit like Michael Rosen’s secret strings game…
- TTLY: My old posts.
Microfiction is like the atomic unit of storytelling. Assuming six words at a minimum, there’s very little time to introduce characters; create a narrative; figure out who matters to who, and why; but, as with any story, something must happen.
Here’s one I cooked up before my seminar last week:
Plap, crack, drive; dreary weald, buried.
Onomatopoeia, onomatopoeia, verb; adjective, noun, verb. Actions have been taken, a sense described, and a location, given. Your mind tries to derive meaning from these words’ relation to the other words. It’s not much, but it’s honest work.
Some others, just to be vain:
His Liked page hid no longer.
Nukes erased the lemonade stand markets.
Elon Musk? I’m CIA.
In her essay “Short Fiction, Flash Fiction, Microfiction,” Angela Naimou examines how short stories try to infold aeons of time into a few hundred words. It is literally impossible to grasp the entirety of the history of life on Earth between two hands1. What else can a writer do, then, but create a mnemonic? “Telling details,” she calls it:
Atoms bump and lump. Birds have sex. Bears have sex. The sun gets better at rising. Monkeys play with sticks.
From Rachael B. Glaser’s “Pee on Water”
These events, listed one after another, stand in for billions of years’ worth of time. It asks you, the reader, to imagine all the things that must’ve happened in-between, based on what you already know. If you watched a bit of Attenborough the other day, you might wonder when the fish started having sex. What multicellular form of life was first to be hunted, and eaten?
Microfiction rewards the reader by stimulating their imagination. They’re so short, you can’t not fill in the gaps. And in-between those gaps, you’ll find perhaps a six-word story’s greatest strength: They’re prompts, just as much as they’re plots. Put two or three of them together, side-by-side, and you have to ask yourself, “What if these stories are connected in some way?”
His Liked page hid no longer.
Plap, crack, drive; dreary weald, buried.
Not to toot my own horn too much – take a couple of stories from Reddit’s r/sixwordstories:
Rhino, bull, mouse, chimpanzee all absent
Bloody idiots. Just Google it, already.
u/kothimbirvadi & u/BitterUser01
Now you’re building a scaffold in your mind. Where are we going from here? How do we extrude events out from one story, and connect them to the other(s)? Are the animals escaping a zoo? Who’s telling who to Google what? Whatever comes to mind is fair game.
When you start thinking about microfiction as prompts, you’re thinking with parallel universes2 tarot.
No, really. Whether it’s six-word stories, tarot cards, Oblique Strategies, or a Cards Against Humanity deck with only white cards, it’s more or less the same function. Entrusting your story’s direction to the cards restricts and directs your imagination. Our creativity is so limitless, we have to bind it with rules to make it run. Paradoxical, isn’t it? It’s why we limit ourselves to genre (among many other reasons):
“What if these two things aren’t a coincidence?” might be the rhetorical technique of conspiracy theorists, as Cory Doctorow writes. The difference, however, is that we know we’re using our tarot (or equivalent) to direct our writing – as Doctorow also writes:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/31/divination/
We know the results have come by our own actions, not some higher power – we shuffled the deck, after all. And fiction, by definition, concerns histories and or people who are made up.
All of this strikes a resonant chord with Michael Rosen’s ‘secret strings’ game I covered in a previous post:
https://brologue.net/2024/10/12/dont-show-dont-tell/
My cohorts are dead good writers, but when it comes to analysing their stories – to find the right questions that would help them focus their revision – I often get lost. I don’t understand everything that’s going on my first time round. That’s a me problem.
The secret strings game is a technique to break this deadlock. It’s a game that directs how I read something:
https://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2021/04/my-secret-strings-game-to-unlock-texts.html
It’s a not too dissimilar objective to using tarot to direct your writing. Where it obviously differs is the fact that tarot is a tool of chance, and there’s no such luck going on with secret strings. But when you do break that writing deadlock, and when you do see that clandestine connection, you feel the exact same serendipitous hit. (At least I do, anyway…)
I would go over Rosen’s example in Rosen’s Almanac, but I think I’d like to put my money where my mouth is in another post. Here’s what I’m going to do: next week, I’m running a student-led seminar with two of my cohorts. The topic is ‘serious issues through fiction,’ and we’ve asked everyone to read excerpts from three books:
- The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (race/class)
- Mayflies, by Andrew O’Hagan (assisted dying)
- Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett (police brutality – no prizes given to a correct guess as to who set this book…)
https://brologue.net/2024/12/13/picnis/
I’ll read through them once, then go back again and play some secret strings as I go. Once I’ve got enough connections to write a post, you’ll find the results here.
[INSERT FUTURE BROLOGUE HERE…]
Likewise, for the microfiction technique. I’ve been using more Oblique Strategies of late, and I’d like to try tarot, just to see what happens, but I know I haven’t actually written any flash fiction here. So, IOU one story.
[INSERT FUTURE STORY HERE…]
TTLY…
- [Mar 4] The Butcher, the Baker, the Brimstone Maker https://brologue.net/2024/03/04/tainted-cains-amazing-commodities/
- Unless it’s on a poster. ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpk2tdsPh0A ↩︎
Mnenomics, Divination, and the Return of the Secret Strings is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Use it however you like, even commercially, so long as you attribute it to me, bm, and link back to this original article.