{"id":361,"date":"2005-07-01T12:35:35","date_gmt":"2005-07-01T17:35:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.xorph.com\/creator\/2005\/07\/01\/im-stealing-the-idea-of-the-photo-caption-story\/"},"modified":"2005-07-01T12:35:35","modified_gmt":"2005-07-01T17:35:35","slug":"im-stealing-the-idea-of-the-photo-caption-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/2005\/07\/01\/im-stealing-the-idea-of-the-photo-caption-story\/","title":{"rendered":"I’m stealing the idea of the photo-caption story."},"content":{"rendered":"

I found Roy Peter Clark’s Fifty Writing Tools<\/a> via Leonard’s del.icio.us, originally, and had them recommended to me again by Catherine Frostflake<\/a>. I’ve been reading and digesting a few every day, and today I hit Polish Your Jewels<\/a>, which reads like a manifesto for microfiction:<\/p>\n

“The shorter the story form, the more precious is each word…<\/p>\n

My friend Peter Meinke, a brilliant poet, taught me that short writing forms have three peculiar strengths. Their brevity can give them a focused power; it creates opportunity for wit; and it inspires the writer to polish, to reveal the luster of the language.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All of the essays (so far) are solid, interesting, unpretentious and broadly applicable.<\/p>\n

I’ve been thinking for a while of putting together a similar set of microfiction-writing tools, to be released around the time we hit anacrusis #500 (August 16). I’m not a pro like Mr. Clark, so this would involve some significant hubris, which is why I started mocking myself for the idea with Story Hacks<\/a>. After a while I realized that all the useful word-cutting advice I’ve got could be applied to itself, which leaves me with<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Contractions!\n<\/li>\n
  2. Cut out the first paragraph.\n
      \n
    • And probably the second.\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      I found Roy Peter Clark’s Fifty Writing Tools via Leonard’s del.icio.us, originally, and had them recommended to me again by Catherine Frostflake. I’ve been reading and digesting a few every day, and today I hit Polish Your Jewels, which reads like a manifesto for microfiction: “The shorter the story form, the more precious is each […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,27,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discoveries","category-leonard-richardson","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}