Introduction

Who knew that tiny stories could hold so many unexpected pleasures? In a world where the ruling assumption is that bigger is better, it seems eccentric to find big pleasures in small things. More so when that smallness is deliberate, as is the case with the 100-word stories in this book.
  Much has been written about art forms that make use of constraint: The painter who restricts her palette to red and green. The musician who composes with only three notes. Haiku poetry. I don’t understand why such constraints engender creativity, but they seem to. What I have not heard is reasons for the pleasure that comes from creating with self-imposed constraints.
  And so, fresh from writing over a hundred of these micro-stories, I’ll take a stab at an explanation: It is the pleasure that comes from being both godlike and sneaky at the same time.
    When you constrain a piece of writing to exactly one hundred words, each story is like a tiny bonsai tree. You prune away all but the most necessary branches, careful not to disrupt the tree’s life system. Each word and phrase counts. Each must sing close harmony with the story’s essential tune and perform no more and no less than its job. Like a bonsai, each 100-worder is an exercise in cultivation and ingenuity for the writer, who becomes a miniature god, creating a tiny, living world within the brittle confines of an utterly arbitrary box.
  Add to that the pleasures of secret worlds. Tiny stories, when they work, are little hidey-holes that only the writer and reader know about. The writer traces the contours of a story, leaving spaces for the reader’s imagination to fill. When this conspiracy is working, writer and reader enter a telepathic mind-meld together.
  And finally, there is the alchemical satisfaction that comes from starting something and finishing it.  Something starts, grows, and comes full circle. If you’re lucky enough to have a secret writer-reader collusion, there, in the imaginal space that only you two occupy, a small organism unfurls in the palms of your hands. A minuscule one-act play. A tiny ship in a bottle. A fleeting moment captured in a bubble and held up to the light. All in a single teaspoon of time.
  But enough with attempts to explain these pleasures. When you get down to it, it just feels good.

Jim Gilkeson,
Lawrence, Kansas,  November 19, 2024