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I'm always glad to brainstorm about tiny writing and how to incorporate it into a class or a community project. You can find me at Twitter, @OnlineCrsLady, or email me at laurakgibbs@gmail.com.
Happy Writing!

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The 6-word memoir has inspired so much great writing; just Google 6-word memoir and you will get a superabundance of results. But the biggest 6-word memoir project going is the one at Smith Magazine, which you can learn about in this NPR interview: Can You Tell Your Life Story In Exactly Six Words?

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Here's a 6-word story in the form of an Onion headline: Nasa Panics After Asteroid Fires Back.
If you start looking for 6-word stories, you never know where you might find them. News headlines and image captions are good places to look.

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A story from the New York Times' True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less.
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He Tried So Hard to Remember Me
When my 61-year-old father learned he had Alzheimer's, we went to CVS together and bought the largest stack of notecards they sold. I asked, "What's the town where you grew up?" We wrote Union Springs, Alabama. I asked, "Who was your first kiss?" Amanda. Four years later, preparing to move my father into memory care, I packed up his desk. Taking the notecards felt silly, so I wrapped the long-forgotten stack in a rubber band and opened his drawer to toss them away. Inside, I found more notecards. They all said the same thing: my name.
By Drew Hasson

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This story is from Insignia Drabbles, volume 2: Southeast Asian Fantasy Drabbles.
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The Sound of Water
Benjamin Y. Tan
The monsoon was late.Tadpoles lay gasping in muddy pools. Jungle fowl left the dense canopied heat in search of water, the feral cats too parched to give them chase.
As he left the village, Ming did not give his father a second glance. The old man could hardly lift his lids.
Wading into the river, water warm against his naked skin, Ming uttered words the cunning herb-woman had taught him, in the zinc-roofed hut where her jade talismans gleamed like teeth.
As the water sang in his ears, Ming thought he heard a distant roll of thunder. He smiled.

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This story by Courtney Watson comes from the Nothing Short of 100 book from the 100-Word-Story project.
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HARD TIME
by Courtney Watson
Joe ordered his first kit from a hobby magazine sent to his cell mate. The house was an antebellum plantation with a blue-papered bathroom and white columns. It had staircases and a library full of tiny books with real pages. The house was populated by little doll people, also ordered from the back pages, who would never, ever in their little doll lives rob the doll bank, armed with a tiny doll gun, shoot two of the doll tellers, and be sent to doll prison. It just wouldn't happen. Not when they had a place like this to call home.

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This is a Ndau story from Mozambique; more about the story. Does this rabbit remind you of Bugs Bunny? He should! The trickster rabbit of Africa storytellers gave us the American Brer Rabbit, and his cartoon cousin, Bugs Bunny, too.
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The Rabbit, the Baboon, and the Peanuts

Rabbit and Baboon raided a peanut-garden.

As they feasted, Rabbit said, “Let’s play a game with our fingers!”

“No,” said Baboon. “I’m using my fingers to eat.”

“With our mouths!”

“No, I’m using my mouth.”

“With our eyes!”

“No, I’m using my eyes.”

“With our tails!”

“Okay,” Baboon agreed, “but you’ll have to show me how to play this game.”

“It’s easy,” said Rabbit as he grabbed Baboon’s tail and tied it to a stake in the ground. Then Rabbit shouted, “Come, people! Come, dogs! Baboon’s stealing your peanuts!”

While the people and dogs attacked Baboon, Rabbit ran away, laughing.

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This is one of the Congo stories in Trayle Kulshan's Revolutions.
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The Cook
"In burnt-out houses they cannot smell your fire." The cook paused while the short-haired dog licked her hand. "The walls are charred and stink of smoke. No need to hide your traces, even when they're chasing." She survived the war with a dull knife and the dog. They gnawed at smoked porcupine, Sucked palm oil from fallen nuts, and stole small black tubers left for dead in pillaged fields. Still hungry, she slipped back between the jungle's fat vines and thorny trees, avoiding open rusty bridges and rutted roads where men and children crept, blurry-eyed and out of step.

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From Ran Walker's Strange Museum — this is the other scarecrow story. :-)
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THE SCARECROW
Jerry fought the peer pressure from his friends to pelt the old scarecrow with miniature pumpkins they had stolen from Old Man Granger's farmer's market. That was why when Halloween night finally arrived and the battered scarecrow stepped down from its perch, Jerry was the only one who was spared.

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This is the story that gives the book its title: The Tyranny of Sand.
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The man rides the horse across the high desert.
The horse thinks of water, and hay, and apples.
The man thinks of whiskey, and the letter in his pouch, and the tyranny of sand.
The desert thinks only of conquest, already spreading a little faster than the horse can run each day.

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Here's one from Jeff Provine, one of my favorite #VSS365 writers. And there's another scarecrow story coming up later in the padlet. :-)
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We run screaming back to the barn. "Grampy! The scarecrow's walking around the field BY ITSELF!" He leans on his pitchfork. "'Course it is. What crow'd be afraid of it if it just stood there?" He laughs and shakes his head. "Kids today don't know a charm when they see one."

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This 25-word story comes from Swartwood's Hint Fiction; the author is Will Panzo. Notice that it has an enormous title, but still does not name the subject. The reader has work to do! As a general rule, the shorter the story, the more work the reader has to do... which is part of the pleasure of tiny stories.
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THE MAN OF TOMORROW OR MAYBE YOU'VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE, BUT YOU'VE NEVER HEARD IT LIKE THIS
Dying planet. A boy, a rocket, a last hope. Kansas cornfield crash landing. Ma finds it sleeping in the crater. Pa fetches the shotgun.

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And here's one more story from Doug Weller. In addition to being intriguing on their own, these 6-word stories make great WRITING PROMPTS for writing longer stories (50 words? 100? flash fiction up to 1000 words?). People writing from the same 6-word prompt like this one will come up with very different stories! The 6-word prompt often makes a good attention-getting title for the longer story.
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Pregnancy test: Positive. Boyfriend test: Negative...

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Here's another Doug Weller story. For this one, Weller added a tiny graphic to the story; pairing up 6-word stories with a graphic, big or small, can be a great way to bring the story more to life and also to offer the reader a clue about what to imagine.
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Last words: Is this thing loaded?

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Here's one of Doug Weller's 6-word stories. Note the creative punctuation and formatting.
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Scuba-diving. Lost! *suffocating* Mermaids! Never resurfaced.

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My favorite book from the SixWordMemoirs project is Six Words Fresh Off the Boat: Stories of Immigration, Identity, and Coming to America.
Here's a video that tells about the book and features many stories, together with their authors. Just a few of the stories featured in the video:

Even Siri does not understand me.

What IS that in your lunchbox?

NO, I DO NOT SPEAK Indian.

I can't spell my grandmother's name.

Born in Tule Lake. Google it.

I Do Not Know Kung Fu.

I only speak Spanish on weekends.

.... and yes, you will celebrities interspersed here, along with everyday people you have never heard of. They all have stories.

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Six Words Fresh Off the Boat: Stories of Coming to America

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This is a 2-sentence horror story by one of my students. What a genius use of first-person style!
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Shade of Red
I understand the makeup artist doesn't know what my personal preferences are, and I don't mean to be obnoxious, but I can't help my exasperation with the shade of red she's chosen.
Although, I guess I should cut her some slack, given that it's probably dificult to make lipstick look vibrant when you're putting it ona corpse.

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This is a 6-word story by a student writing in Fall 2020, the first year of the pandemic. Notice how the title provides a more specific clue to the meaning of the story.
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Pandemic December. Newly empty chairs haunt Christmas dinner.

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The best PostSecret postcards combine words and images as in this image where the U.S. flag becomes something a lined page of paper to write on.
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I am a firefighter. I am afraid the day might come when I'm not as brave as I am supposed to be.

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Here's a sentence doodle that we created in a workshop together, working collaboratively in a Google Doc, starting with the phrase "the spaceship landed." You can see more sentence-doodles in Tiny Tales from the Digital Pedagogy Lab, including more doodles from this same prompt.
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The Spaceship Landed

The spaceship sat alone, rusting, half-submerged in a hill that rose up like a grassy bubble in the boundless prairie, sitting there as it had been sitting for millennia, its once shiny exterior emblazoned with the symbols of some other civilization now covered over with the green life of this planet, but the tiny laser beacon kept pulsing, pulsing until finally a flock of Canada geese landed in a wide circle around it, honking absently yet intentionally, using a language unknown to earthling birds but very familiar to the alien birds they knew were inside the ship, “Sorry we’re late!”

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I cannot say enough good things about Doug Weller's Six Word Wonder Workbook: Write Your Own Six Word Stories, Poems, Memoirs, and Jokes.
And Doug Weller practies what he preaches; he's published several books of his own 6-word stories; find out more at his website: DougWeller.net.

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To explore the world of "flash fiction" and longer forms of short writing (usually under 1000 words), the Rose Metal Field Guides are super-useful: Flash Fiction, Prose Poetry, and Flash Nonfiction. I would especially recommend the flash nonfiction book for great ideas about integrating short writing into all kinds of courses.

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A popular name for 100-word stories is "drabbles," and if you search Amazon.com, you will find dozens of drabble books. (I recommend using a search engine to filter out books by Margaret Drabble; for example, a Google search.)
One of my favorites is the Insignia Drabble series of Asian myth and fantasy fiction (they just recently published the fourth volume!).

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Just short of 100 would be... 99! And Trayle Kulshan has written a brilliant book of 99-word stories, what you might call fictionalized memoir; you can find out more at her website: Revolutions.

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I mentioned Ran Walker's 50-word stories earlier, and he also writes 100-word stories, like Keep It 100. And here's another remarkable experiment: he's written two 100-word novels, which is to say, novels that are composed of 100-word episodes: A Burst of Gray and Black Marker. They are both a pleasure to read, but I liked Burst of Gray best.

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Ran Walker writes many kinds of microfiction, and one of my favorites among his many books is this collection of 50 words stories: The Strange Museum.

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PostSecret is a remarkable project organized by Frank Warren back in 2005, and it's still going strong; find out more at Wikipedia. New cards are posted every Sunday at the PostSecret.com site, and you can find several PostSecret books at Amazon.
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SHARE A SECRET
You are invited to anonymously contribute a secret to a group art project. Your secret can be a regret, fear, betrayal, desire, confession or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before.
Steps:
Take a postcard, or two.
Tell your secret anonymously.
Stamp and mail the postcard.
Tips
Be brief - the fewer word
Be legible - use big, clear and bold lettering.
Be creative - let the postcard be your canvas.

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After I started writing microfiction in Spring 2020, my students jumped right in and wanted to experiment with short writing too, and they published anthologies of their "tiny tales" in Fall 2020 and in Spring 2021. They're free ebooks! (We used Pressbooks to publish the books.)

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book covers of the 3 One-Sentence Stories anthologies

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Valerie Dumond's delightful book series, One-Sentence Stories: An Anthology of Stories Told in a Single Sentence, is not really about 100-word stories, but it is a wonderful way to write 100-word stories collaboratively. Just start with a kernel word or phrase in a shared space (like a Google Doc), and let people add and add and add until you get a nice long 100-word sentence. Or longer!

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2-sentence horror stories are not just a genre of microfiction... they are also a TV series that has been running on Netflix since 2019. If you Google 2-sentence horror stories, you will find lots of collections to browse online.

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Smith Magazine has a website dedicated to its 6-word memoir projects: SixWordMemoirs.com. You will find lots of memoirs there, along with free teaching guides. They have also published a series of 6-word memoir books.

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screenshot of @MicroFlashFic Twitter account

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Jesse Stanchak publishes new stories every day at @MicroFlashFic, and from those hundreds of stories, he's also published an anthology of his favorites: The Tyranny of Sand and Other Tiny Stories.

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Clicking on #VSS365 will take you to "very short stories" every day of the year (365) at Twitter, based on a 1-word prompt each day that comes from the VSS365 main Twitter account. You can also find the daily prompt at the VSS365 website.

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The "Tiny Love Stories" project at the New York Times features 100-word love stories sent in by readers. You can find the stories here: New York Times Tiny Love Stories, and the stories have also been published in book form: Tiny Love Stories: True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less.

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I write books of 100-word "tiny tales" based on traditional fables, folktales, and legends. The books are CC-licensed OER (open educational resources) free to download, remix, and reuse. There are 10 tiny tale books available at 100Words.LauraGibbs.net, with free audiobooks too.

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The 100WordStory.org project is full of stories to enjoy and learn from! You can also follow them at Twitter. One of the co-founders of this project is Grant Faulkner, whom you may know as the director of NaNoWriMo (National Novel-Writing Month).

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'Hint Fiction' Celebrates The (Extremely) Short Story at NPR. This is an interview with Robert Swartwood, author of the book Hint Fiction: Stories in 25 Words or Fewer.

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‘Hint Fiction’ Celebrates The (Extremely) Short Story

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Can you tell a story in 25 words or fewer? Inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s six-word novel — “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” — Robert Swartwood has compiled a new anthology featuring bite-sized works of fiction.

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screenshot of Future Teacher Talks UK website

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This Padlet is a presentation for Future Teacher Talk: Strategies to Support Writing on Sept. 30 2022. To view as a presentation, switch to Slide view (or, on your phone, just expand a post to full-screen view).
You can also download a PDF (updated Sept. 29 2022).
Please feel free to add comments or ask questions; each post/slide has its own comment box. The conversation can go on beyond the webinar. :-)

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animated gif: Disney genie emerges from lamp

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You know how somehow that giant genie fits inside a little lamp or a tiny bottle?
That is the genius of tiny writing.
It's bigger than it looks at first.
And it possesses magic powers. :-)
Gif from Imgur.

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Microwriting can help all your students feel confident and accomplished.

Tiny writing allows more time for both feedback and revision.

6 words, 25 words, 50 words, 100-words, tweets, 1 sentence, 2 sentences... so much micro-variety!

Image: May Aladdin's Lamp Be Thine (also the background image for this Padlet).