How do you tell a killer story in less than 100 words?
You cheat.
Or rather, you trick your reader into doing the work for you. You tell the story in such a way that your reader has a job to do:
- Wondering about the bigger world the story takes place in
- Playing with concepts, emotions, or tropes they're already invested in
- Wondering about interesting and intentionally unanswered questions
- Piecing together the backstory or narrative context
Over the past 9 years, I've written hundreds of micro-stories for my website The Shortest Story. I've published 3 books of microfiction and gotten millions of views and 140,000+ followers on TikTok.
Since I'll be judging micro-stories for The Story Engine's free-to-enter microfiction contest and I might end up reading your story, I thought I'd share my tips and tricks for writing great microfiction.
I sifted through hundreds of my stories and picked 5 favorites. I'm going to tell you exactly why they work.
Micro-story #1: "When Life Gives You Demons"
This story got hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok and Imgur.
Here's why I think people really responded to it.
✅ It starts with trouble
The first sentence gives us a warlock, a curse, and a bedeviled doll. Leading with conflict is a great way to hook your reads and establish a premise.
✅ It uses a trope
This story uses a trope readers are already familiar with: cursed objects (dolls in particular). It saves me word count on exposition and lets me dive right into setting up the narrative arc. Speaking of which...
✅ It builds the narrative arc quickly
A great story shows a character trying to overcome something. Microfiction can sometimes cheat this, but I think the most satisfying stories will still use some word count to establish the characters struggling. This story shows the town trying a bunch of ideas that not only let us relate to their struggle, but set up the eventual solution.
✅ The happy ending surprises the reader
Just using a trope isn't enough. With a short word count, you still need to surprise your reader. I did this by upsetting the trope giving an uncharacteristically happy ending for a story that starts off in the horror genre.
Micro-story #2: "The Fog"
✅ It lulls the reader into a false sense of security
The story clearly kicks off with a horror premise, but it also starts with a lot of assurances that give the reader a false sense of security. By focusing on the town doing head counts and staying safe, the reader feels like the threat is still come—not that it's already in their midst.
✅ The story/world doesn't stop to explain itself
The story never fully explains what's going on with the worldbuilding. We don't know where the fog came from, or why. We don't need to for the story the work. So the story saves its word count for the essential beats needed to build up to the ending and leaves the reader to imagine the cause on their own.
✅ The ending feels both surprising and inevitable
Endings are difficult. Twists can be surprising, but often feel unearned, or like they came out of nowhere. A great ending is something that the reader doesn't quite see coming, but in retrospect feels inevitable when they look back at the moments leading up to it. I feel like this story really stuck the landing with the ending revealing that that the town was never safe.
Micro-story #3: "Public Time Transit"
✅ It makes the most of its genre
Science fiction works great for microfiction. The genre is set up to let you quickly establish a premise (e.g., a new technology, an alien species) and quickly explore how that would affect real people. This story explores the concept of commuter time travel in a way that I think is both vivid and novel.
✅ It uses strong, quick, specific examples
To really sell the core premise of the story, I tried to write some very short, specific, and memorable examples of time travel tourism. Rather than writing a generic "People could visit any time period they wanted," I got specific about seeing people post selfies from ancient Sparta or the Abyssinian Empire. The later example of "Buses to Victorian England. Trains to the Sack of Rome and back." is only 12 words long, but does a lot to make the technology feel real and tangible.
✅ It has a grounded ending
The ending to this story plays against the sci-fi genre trope of the fantastic "world of tomorrow" by staying very grounded in the everyday experience of technology and what it means to the working class. I think that takes the story in an unexpected direction that still feels very familiar to anyone who's ridden a bus before.
Micro-story #4: "Hide and Seek"
Heads up: this story is very emotionally intense.
✅ It has a killer premise
This story is powered by a premise that I would desperately love to see as a full-length movie: what if one day, everyone on the planet was suddenly compelled to play a to-the-death game of hide and seek with someone they love? By fitting a big premise into a small story, it leaves the reader wanting more.
✅ It lets the reader build the world
This story teases out the premise, but never explains it in full. It drops a few hints but leaves the reader wondering, and actually leaves them to chew on the big questions like "How did this happen?" and "How is this affecting everyone else" while staying tightly focused on the intimate story between the narrator and Daniel.
✅ It uses an interesting story framework (diary)
I LOVE epistolary stories—stories that are framed as letters, diary entries, newspaper articles, or otherwise that present themselves as existing within the world of the story. I think the tight, exhausted voice of the narrator writing in their diary makes for an interesting story frame and supports the larger worldbuilding and storytelling.
✅ The ending goes hard
I cried when writing the ending to this story. Good art makes you flinch because it doesn't hold back. If what you're writing makes you uncomfortable, that can sometimes be a sign that there's something real going on in the text.
Micro-story #5: "Ethics Committee"
This was my first story to really pop off on TikTok. I have some theories as to why.
✅ It's funny
This piece is half-way between a story and a joke. It ends on a sentence that doubles as both a big reveal and a punchline. Good stories surprise the reader, and humor is a good way to deliver that surprise.
✅ It escalates quickly
The story opens with a fairly innocent question, but quickly builds in intensity. I think the story does a very good job of ramping up how specific and suspicious the questions are until the big reveal.
✅ The big reveal is just the true context for the first three sentences
The last sentence of this story does a lot of things with very few words, but its most important job is revealing the context in which the story itself is being narrated: as a speech from a scientist to an ethics committee (that he's just replaced with obedient laboratory clones). The events of the story aren't particularly interesting. What's original is revealing that the entire context of the story by pulling back the narrative curtain in the final line and letting the reader assemble the parts of the story.
Want to read more microfiction?
If you'd like to read more of my microstories, The Story Engine Anthology and PDF ebook is 50% off until the end of the month.
Got a story to tell?
The Story Engine is hosting a free-to-enter 100-word writing contest where you can win a $250 cash prize and one of our decks of writing prompts.
Check out the details on the contest page and be sure to submit your story by September 30. I can't wait to read it!
