Photo: SashaW
Matador presents travel stories condensed to three sentences or less..
Last week we put out a call for Micro Notes.
The goal was to tell a complete travel story–something with character, setting, chronology, and ideally, some kind of transformation–in three sentences or less.
A couple of interesting patterns occurred to me as I read through the submissions:
1. The more writers tried to set up a context or provide background information, the more it worked against the overall effect / power of the story. In three sentences there just wasn’t space.
2. The most effective writing read like Twitter updates. They seemed to assume you as the reader already knew everything, and so the writer needed only to remind him or herself of what was happening or what had happened. They took one particular moment in time and place and reported on it without trying to make it more than it was. Which of course, gives it a chance to be more than it was.
Overall, dozens of people submitted their work. Big ups to everyone who sent something. These were our favorites:
Maya Marie Weeks
In Reykjavik I did much the same as in Grass Valley: walked the streets like a local without a car, drinking coffee, avoiding stepping in dog shit. Space is relative, but the thing about Iceland is the island’s crooked horizon. Not a single one of my pictures turned out.
Alex Blackwelder
I loved China until a married man bit my ear on a train three hours south of Beijing. He told me he loved me, but I pretended to not understand. After he left a kind woman boarded and held me until I loved China again.
Susan Marjanovic
Sitting on an old Carolina porch under wind chimes made from old doorknobs & faucets, playing a tiny toy piano trying to capture the sound of my contentment. Today I planted zucchini seedlings.
Audrey Medina
The four of us spent the morning in pajamas, casting home-tied flies onto the shimmering, duckless expanse of Duck Lake. Hidden among the ponderosas beneath a ridge of Sierran granite, our little tents smelled of fried brook trout, wet dogs, and bourbon spilt from plastic flasks. On the trek back down the mountain, we passed a rusted iron sign that read “Duck Lake 2.0 M;” its pointy end leaning toward a previously overlooked fork in the trail.
Community Connection
Have micro-notes you’d like to submit? Please send them to david [at] matadornetwork.com. We’ll be rounding these up and publishing our favorites ever 1-2 weeks.
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17 Comments... join the discussion!
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Awesome. Loved Maya’s, I’ve taken an obsessive interest in Iceland lately.
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I love this idea! It really forces you to think about the small details that tell the bigger story. Gorgeous writing, all.
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thanks jenny.
this was actually josh’s idea.
would love to see some micro notes from you.
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Great stuff! David, this – “They seemed to assume you as the reader already knew everything, and so the writer needed only to remind him or herself of what was happening or what had happened.” – reminds me of that Hemingway line in A Moveable Feast. It went something like, “You can omit almost anything so long as you know what you are omitting.”
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thanks eva!
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great stuff … I love love loved this though – … playing a tiny toy piano trying to capture the sound of my contentment.
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Nice work people! Short and sweet, like little literary lollipops!
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thanks for your conceptional wisdom, Josh! i look forward to reading more of these.
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Love them all. I think my favorite may be Susan’s.
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great idea. all are fantastic…i loved alex’s.
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This really was a great idea. I like the ones you have chosen because they tell so much in so little words. Beautiful piece! Now mine:
Sitting on a black sand beach, sipping on a fresh fruit “batido”, listening to the waves roll in while finishing the last few pages of my book just as the sun sets over the rain forest – life doesn’t get much better than this! Getting paid to travel really does have it’s rewards!
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Thanks, Aaron & Nancy! I’m glad you enjoyed it.
And thanks to David for creating a space where the spontaneity of travel-tweets can exist someplace besides the twitterstream.
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appreciate the bigups susan.
i was stoked about the writing for this. we’ll definitely continue pushing it.
have to give credit for the concept though–our man in LA, Joshywashington.
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I am very happy that the response to Micro-Notes has been so positive. Everybody keep their fingers limber, we will be asking for more Micro-Notes soon.
Little snacks of prose are where it is at in this increasingly brief and spastic info space. The 140 characters of tweets and texts has redefined what communication consists of and by and by I think the trend is a positive one. It allows for more interaction with more people.
Although I am a reader and enjoy the classic literary model ( I know many traditional types view tweets and such as the demise of the written word ) I look forward to the evolution of these communications.Anything we can say in 400 words we can say in 40 or 4.
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I loved the micronote activity as well…but not because we use too many words usually, as Joshua suggests.
Are we so busy, that we cant take the time or effort to express our thoughts or feelings or actions in less than 400 words?? OR ELSE?? who does that benefit?? If we communicate like that, in short/staccato sentences and commands–won’t the subtle nuances of our communciation be lost? Emails and texts already leave much to be desired..think tone/loss of body language/eye contact….how many times have we misread what the authors intent was, because the peronal touch is gone–how much POORER will our art of communication be, if we are now trying to communicate in as little words as possible!↵ -
interesting discussion.
for me it’s not about being busy or using too many words or any of that…
i like the challenge of learning the economy of words….i so often end up in stream-of-consciousness writing and feel i’m spewing too much, and there is something sweet about short, concise descriptions packed full of power…but it’s not like texing or im where words get diluted & abbreviated. this is more about saying more with less characters. sometimes the things that other people have said that have hit me the most & stayed with me through the years have been short, to the point profound statements that were easy to recall.
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