The origin story for my recently published piece, Envy, a User’s Guide (published here at Eulogy Press) is on one hand simple, and on the other hand, hard as hell.

Several months ago I took an online workshop on microfiction. What’s microfiction? It’s one of the latest in a series of subcategories of literature, mostly defined by length. You probably know of short stories and novels (short vs long). There are also novellas (longer than short stories) and novelettes (longer than novellas but not quite novels). 

And then on the other end of short stories there’s flash, which is 1000 words or less. Now, writing a complete story in 1000 words or less is pretty damn hard. But you can go even shorter. With microfiction we’re talking about 400 words max. 

(Disclaimer: there aren’t hard and fast rules. Surely people will have different guidelines for these lengths.)

I’ve dabbled in shorter than short. Like, 150-word pieces. I even got a 100-word story published. The thing is, at that length, you have to jettison just about everything that makes writing (and reading)  fun: the color, the expansiveness, the luxuriousness, the flavor. And it’s HARD. I think the shortest story most people know is this six-word one from Hemingway:

Baby shoes for sale, never worn.

Great in terms of giving some heartache with the fewest words. But that’s about it.

Still, I took this online course in microfiction, and one of the things they stressed was using that constricted canvas to experiment, to let your story live in a borderless zone between prose and poetry. Get a little wacky. 

So I decided to give it another shot. I went in thinking less about telling a traditional story and instead I viewed it as a way to convey a different kind of reality. The one I chose relates to my favorite deadly sin. Envy. I wanted to get into the head of someone who experiences envy as a crippling, phenomena. I wanted to present envy as a physical reality versus an ephemeral one. I wanted to get as close to personifying envy as Envy as I could without making it a literal person.

The hardest part of this story was the wordsmithing. When you’ve got only so many words, every one of them has to do a ton of work. I revised, at the same cafe, morning after morning, a couple weeks straight, to the point where I almost killed it (that feeling when you’ve wrung out every bit of originality and smothered all the life out of it). Apparently I didn’t, because some brave editor out there responded to it and published it.

Am I eager to take on another microfiction piece again? Not so much. But I did learn something valuable: don’t shy away from taking on a writing challenge. You never know when you can create a bit of art out of it.