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I have been writing fiction for quite a while, and if I counted my childhood, where I wrote small stories in folded sheets of paper and tried to sell them to my parents, it would be even longer. Even in all that time, besides the stories themselves, I had never created anything — until I wrote my first 100 x 100 micro novel (which I have on multiple occasions referred to as a “Novel in 100-Word Stories” in an effort to make it easier for the reading public to understand the concept).
It started as a “what if,” like many other curiosities do. What if I wrote the arc of a novel in 100 chapters containing exactly 100 words each? I had written collections of 100-word stories before, something that has roots that go back to Paul Strohm’s Sportin’ Jack, followed by Grant Faulkner’s Fissures, and while the 100-word story as a form has taken off and is enjoyed by writers across the world, no one had strung them together into a larger story until I published A Burst of Gray. Shortly afterwards, I began to challenge my creative writing students, as well as other writers, to try their hands at the form. Few took me up on it, but eventually one of my students locked into the form and is working on what I sense will be an amazing book that only she could write. Should she ever publish it, I will be her biggest fan. As of this date, though, only one writer, whom I met through my wife, has successfully created a 100 x 100 micro book (nonfiction, as opposed to fiction) and that is Glenn Hadley, who wrote a wonderful book about how he met his wife and the life they built together titled An Evolving Love Story of 100-Word Chapters: Volume 1. I highly recommend it for those of you who would love to see an excellent example of the form being used to write a memoir. But how in the world can you (1) write a full story using 100-word chapters, and (2) have the audacity to call anything that amounts to 10,000 words a novel? Let’s start with the latter. I realize others are prepared to die on this hill, but to me a novel is not necessarily dictated by length; it is dictated by development. And if you’d like to dig a little deeper, you might find that many “novels” are in fact not even novels; they are novellas. And to compound that, many of those books that are technically novels are really bloated novellas. In short, I think we waste a lot of time relying on definitions like this, but if you are a stickler for the 50,000+ word definition, then feel free to refer to the 100 x 100 micro novel as a novella or novelette, but do note that I say “micro” novel, which emphasizes a tremendous amount of distillation and brevity. So I will happily use this oxymoron until someone can come up with something better. Now, for the former question. If you think about the narrative arc of a story — and consider that 100 chapters is a nice, clean number to gage percentages — then you can sense where a story should be 75 chapters in or where a hook should be in the earlier part of a book. It’s not rocket science; it’s measured storytelling. Where it gets interesting, though, is how you select the right scenes and arrange them so that the chapters can breathe like chapters and move the narrative forward. Writing a 100 x 100 micro novel (or a 50 x 50 micro novella) is all about carefully curating the moments that are essential to the larger story arc. Dialogue and descriptions must be more carefully chosen. The desire to engage in insane bouts of literary logorrhea must be controlled. And like any other form of microfiction, you must feel comfortable implying things, as opposed to saying them explicitly. One last question: how is this different from a “flash novel” (a term coined by Nancy Stohlman) or a “novella-in-flash” (a term that has flourished throughout the U.K.)? I could talk about a number of things, but it would only obfuscate the one key thing that matters: the 100 x 100 micro novel is built around a rigid word count and structure. Every single book written like this (sans the chapter titles) is exactly 10,000 words. The other forms, while challenging in their own ways, don’t have exact word counts or lengths. As of this writing, I have written three of these types of books: A Burst of Gray, Black Marker, and GloKat and the Art of Timing. Will I write more? Definitely. I have ideas for novels that never got completed to my satisfaction in the longer form that I feel will work well with this new structure. If, however, you’re writing the next Don Quixote, you might need more than 100 chapters to pull that off. (I say this in jest, but I might very well undertake a task like this myself, just to see if I might be able to entertain Lydia Davis for a brief moment.) If you have dabbled in drabbles (100-word stories), I invite you to challenge yourself and write a 100 x 100 micro novel, as it is feeling kind of lonely out here right now. :) Happy writing!
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Shortly after I finished my first collection of 100-word stories, Keep It 100, I began considering if I could write a novel using 100–word stories/chapters. I had never seen it done before, although I was fairly familiar with the novella-in-flash and the flash novel. Still, this micro-novel, which, honestly, doesn’t seem to completely capture the essence of using a singular, word-specific form, was not something I was seeing in the wild very often. Sure, there were The House on Mango Street, We the Animals, The Department of Speculation, and other novels that used brief chapters, but those books did not have chapters of the exact same length.
The math was easy: 100 100-word stories was 10,000 words. How could a person really keep a straight face while calling that a novel? As I began to write the book, though, I noticed that many of the same ideas and structures I had employed on earlier novels came into play here, as well. Once I completed it and read it, I realized that it very much felt like a novel. It’s just that it was distilled, with space for the reader to interact mentally with the content. So I guess it is possible to write a 10,000-word novel after all. But in the words of Ian Malcolm, just because someone can do something doesn’t exactly mean that they should. To get around this, I had only to answer this question: Why would this novel form be best for this particular story? Answering this question turned out to be much easier than I had originally thought. A Burst of Gray is an unusual book all the way around. It is a story that works effectively in the 100-word story/chapter style, but it is also a work of Afrofuturism that does not rely on race as a part of the plot. It is a love story that one could easily argue is not exactly a love story. It is many things, all of which are different, but it clearly works as a “novel in 100-word stories.” In the future, I hope to see other people using this specific form for their novels. Maybe by then the phrase “A Novel In 100-Word Stories” will have been replaced by a much shorter and smoother monicker. |
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