From Almost an Author:
Today I’m talking with Sci-Fi YA author and fellow columnist here on Almost an Author, Sophia Hanson, about microfiction. I reached out to her after noticing her microfiction on Instagram. I have a love-hate relationship with microfiction. Fitting a piece of writing into the limited perimeters is hard enough, but toss in a time constraint and it requires some major flexing of those writing muscles!
DJS: Was the month-long Instagram challenge the first time you’d tried microfiction?
SH: I’d tried microfiction once or twice in response to Instagram contests. Cassandra Hamm holds prompt contests quarterly. They are tons of fun. I’d never done a month-long challenge before, but wanted to push myself to do the next hard thing. Thirty-one days of posting new content to prompts was definitely out of my comfort zone, and I decided to learn how to include images in the posts. I learned about Canva, tagging, and writing even when I didn’t feel inspired.
DJS: What was the hardest thing about producing microfiction?
SH: Including a whole idea/world within those fifty words, but sometimes it was just as hard to land on fifty, not forty-seven or forty-nine.
DJS: I can certainly agree with that! The exacting word count of microfiction had left me blinking at my computer screen a time or two.
In what ways did writing microfiction affect and benefit your writing?
SH: I love learning how to write tight, and I love writing to prompts. It’s a great challenge, especially when you’ve been working on a larger piece, because it helps to reset your brain and refresh those creative juices.
Link to the rest at Almost an Author