Welcome to Season 21 of the Steemit Learning Challenge! In this six-week course, we invite you to explore the fascinating world of micro-literature (also known as microfiction) and develop your skills in writing creative and impactful stories in very few words.
In this course, you will learn how to:
Develop your imagination: Create complete stories in a few words.
Develop language: Use words in a precise and evocative way.
Tell stories that impact.
In this first week, we want you to explore how stories are told in your culture and write your first micro-story. But first let's establish some important definitions.
According to Dr. Lauro Zavala, Minifiction: It is a term that is created to group all the manifestations and expressions of short literature. Even from narration, lyric, drama, among other genres. Minifiction comes to encompass a great variety of literary forms characterized by their reduced size, extension and expression of the message.
Microstories is a literary genre that challenges the boundaries of narrative, condensing entire stories into a small space. The micro-story would be a subgenre within minifiction. Its characteristics would be:
Microfiction condenses great stories into a few words. Its history is diverse and very exciting. Let's take a short walk through time to learn about its origins and evolution.
Long before writing existed, the ancients already communicated through short and concise stories. Oral tales, fables, and proverbs emerged as a way of transmitting knowledge, values, and experiences from generation to generation. Ancient civilizations formed a rich tradition of short stories, full of symbolism and wisdom.
The Thousand and One Nights, Japanese haiku and Zen koans are examples of how ancient cultures used brevity and depth in their narratives.
In Arab and European villages, fables and short stories of fantastic animals are told at night around campfires.
As civilizations advanced, short stories adapted to new forms of expression.
Latin American Boom: The micro-story became a literary phenomenon, with authors exploring universal and personal themes in a concise and powerful way.
More recently, with the COVID-19 Pandemic and the mediation of social networks, the micro-story and other forms of literary minifiction took on a new boom and popularization.
In this first week, we propose the following learning activities so that together we can begin to answer that question.
Source: A brief historical overview of the Latin American micro-story
You can access the mind map from this link: Microstory. Mind map by @joslud.
Original production by @joslud |