Micro Memoir Recipe Box

By Heather Sellers

Micro memoirs are true stories told in tight packages—from a deft paragraph to a page or two. They are delicious to read, but devilishly difficult to write.  Micro memoir requires strong story-telling skills (plot! character! turns! depth!) alongside careful attention to metaphor, compression, and evocative language. And you have to do this all in about a minute. 

As a writer and as a teacher, I am wild about micros. Because so many crucial writing skills come into play, and you can work on micros in short bursts of time, they are the perfect form for the classroom at every level, and for writers in any genre who want to hone their technique.

Some micros lean more poetic, with rich language and less plot focus. Others blend story and poem. At the other end of the spectrum is a story rendered completely in dialogue and action—a full-blown scene.

There’s a wide range of “normal” in this form, and I encourage writers to try various kinds of micros, along the spectrum, to see the most growth. (Brevity’s “Resources for Teaching” presents a terrific set of prompts and well-organized archives of great micro reading alongside craft essays.)

Here are two recipes for beginning and developing a micro, so you can experiment across the continuum.

1.  POETIC LYRIC MICRO RECIPE

The poetic micro uses an image to create emotion in the reader. The poem-micro shifts in time, using surprising syntax, leaps, and extreme close observation to achieve its effects.

Read “Counting Bats” by Thao Thai. Notice the compelling use of description (“claws gripping the fine, flossy strands that wind protectively around my head”). Notice the alliteration (“fine” and “flossy”; “Four are points on a pirate-compass, ready to plunder”) and the arresting syntax: “I tell you we’ve got bats.”  “Count with me now.” “What comes before one?”

This writer removes connective tissue in order to create poetic rhythm—we leap from crisp observation to haunting question (“What drives a woman out of hiding?”) to supposition (“Nowhere, I tell you. Nowhere comes before one.”) These poetic moves make the micro vibrant, memorable, and evocative.

To write your poetic micro, start with an arresting image: an animal, or some specific object or person in your home that provokes you.

1. Observe your subject carefully and write three lines of description.
2. Ask four questions about the subject, your life, what troubles you.
3. Describe yourself, in tension with your subject matter.
4. Address the reader directly, with one or two lines about what you need help with.
5. Leap to something your ancestors have told you, or that you have heard from someone elder, or someone else in the home or neighborhood.
6. Write this line: “Let’s start again.”
7. Describe the image you began with again, in a new way.
8. Ask another question.
9. With your non-dominant hand, write the answer.

As you work on the micro, choose words that connect to each other sonically, threading alliteration, assonance, and consonance throughout your piece. Allow the piece to turn and jump—trust that the reader will be able to follow as you examine this object, and your own interior.

• MICRO IN SCENE RECIPE

To write a micro in scene, choose a place and time with you and another person engaged in a difficult or complex moment of tension. It doesn’t have to be bad tension—just intense or weighted in some significant way.

In my micro, “In Graves with My Student Elizabeth,” I launched my piece in a classroom in a building on my campus named “Graves Hall.” Students often stay after class with questions, and on this particular Friday afternoon, right before Spring Break, one student lingered, weeping. I chose to simply shoot the movie of that moment, describing what she looked like, what she said and did, and what I said and did: action and dialogue and almost nothing else.  The only additional information I included was the fact that both of our mothers were gone.

I have discovered that if I hew closely to action and dialogue set in a highly charged moment, the micro will actually write itself.  For additional examples, check out Beth Ann Fennelly’s collection of micro memoir, Heating & Cooling.

Here’s the recipe I use:

1. Choose your place and time—where the micro movie will take place, and when.
2. Title the piece with the name of the location and the name of the person you are with, and who they are to you.
3. The first line simply states when this is happening.
4. Then, show us where the light is coming from in this scene.
5. Describe what you are doing. Describe what the other person is doing. Use close observation, and fresh details. Do not include emotions.
6. Where is everyone else?
7. Track the action and dialogue as it plays out over the next five, ten, fifteen minutes.
8. Include a leap to something surprising at the halfway mark: the history of a word, a reference to a dream, or a description of something you yearn for, unrelated to the moment.
9. Return to describing action and dialogue, beat by beat, alternating between you and the other person.
10. End on a line of dialogue.

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Join Heather Sellers for her CRAFT TALKS webinar, Micro Memoir: Writing and Publishing Tiny True Stories. May 8th, 2PM Eastern Time – $25, replay sent to all registrants.

Heather Sellers is the author of, most recently, How to Make Poems, an e-textbook with embedded audio lectures, and Field Notes from the Flood Zone, a collection of prose poems, which won a State of Florida Book Award. She teaches privately in the MFA program at the University of South Florida, where she has won multiple teaching awards. Check out her website to learn about upcoming online and in person workshops.