For me, tiny stories begin with a stray thought. Something I saw on the news. A fear I have. A memory of someone I loved or love still. A friend’s habit. A person I saw out in the world. A photograph. Anything might trigger a tiny story.
They are fiction, though they inevitably start in the real. They are fiction, though there is a truth at the heart of each one. When I started writing these stories, way back in January 2016, I quickly realized that for 100 words to have any kind of impact, I had to distill the story down to that truth or there’d be no life in it.
I wrote 371 stories in 2016 and continued to write a few after. The 100 stories in Shards are all from the 2016 “experiment.” They reflect my view of the world as the world was—because we can only ever write about the past—and I feel I hit some genuine notes in the stories within this collection.
These stories, and the stories not included have lived many lives. They’ve been shared online, a handful have been made into tiny films, and they’ve been performed live by many different voices. So, when it became time to practice self-publishing, starting with a collection of these tiny stories felt natural. They have already paved the way for so much learning.
Craft-wise, they taught the power of the right word in the right place. They taught me how to hold an image, how one gesture builds a whole character, how observations can be thematic.
Practice-wise, putting pen to paper (fingers to keyboard) every day for a year taught me I have the discipline to do hard things. The practice taught me that the creative well is really a creative ocean—if you sincerely want to say one more thing, you’ll find the words.
And I learned side-quest skills: Photoshop, Instagram, Facebook pages.
Really, that’s a lot of teaching for such tiny stories. I thought that was it. Nothing else to teach. My friend John once told me to keep going with the stories—he said I had no idea how far it would go. Push it. And he was right. There was even more to learn.
After my friend Sarah produced a few of these stories as monologues for her production of Arnie’s Love Mix, a “mixtape” of love scenes and monologues, an audience member came up and asked where he could find the poems (stories). The answer, at that point, was digging around this website, my Facebook page, and a somewhat neglected Instagram account. I kicked myself for being stupid and letting all that work languish. How easy would it have been to just hand this guy a tiny book? An itty bitty collection?
So now these stories have taught me: how to curate a collection, how to format the interior of a book (look, I’m still working on it), how to hire and work with cover designers (Damonza’s team for the win), how to find distribution, how to work with Amazon, and finally, how to market a book (also still working on it).
At the end of the day, if you’re a creator, and you’re working on a project that you’re not sure will “go anywhere”—just remember, the act of creation itself is the best teacher and, unless you push it, you won’t know how far one tiny project will take you.
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