Micro-Storytelling Tidbits

What is micro-storytelling? I've now come across this term multiple times and it's unclear to me what it means. Most recently, I saw it used within the context of twitter stories, the building of stories based on short individual entries by different writers over a period of time (check out The New Digital Storytelling blog). This is a form of collaborative writing that is best used in the classroom and as a tool for sparking creative writing. I don't know of many examples though where it has led to the creation of an actual commercial product. 
When I googled the term, I came across this interesting article from Teach Digital. In it, the author Matthew Wordwood describes the telling of a story in incrementally small segments. He has some great suggestions of apps that help writers create 50 to 100 word stories. Why would you ever want to do this? For starters, it is a good exercise that gets your creative writing juices flowing. Also, if you work in marketing or publicity, getting your key branding and messaging in a short and engaging format is critical to capturing those much wanted consumers. 

In wikipedia, you can find the terms Flash Fiction and Micro Fiction defined as "a style of fictional literature or fiction of extreme brevity." As an exercise, I recommend trying to remove all the parts of a story that can remain hidden yet understood or implied in the narrative. It's a great editorial exercise that will lead to stronger more engaging stories whether they be long- or short- form

With the so called Attention Economy driving readers to short-form content and the countless twitter and status updates, I'm not surprised if more platforms pop-up that provide tools for either collaborations or aggregations of stories based on micro-writing. Imagine an instant-roulette of story ideas curated by self-interest search terms. I think we will see this skill set develop more over the next few years. 

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