Since I am currently teaching a course on microfiction, that weird mutating gene/genre that swerves and sways between the prose poem and the short story, I thought I would post a translation of some points made by Andrés Neuman a few years ago in his excellent blog Microrreplicas.

The points are succinct and aphoristic. I have opted for a fairly literal translation,  but not, I hope, too literal . . .

1. Brief is not the same as short: brevity shuts up on time, shortness ahead of time.
2. The mission of every microfiction is to grow without being seen.
3. The most striking thing about the microfiction is not its tiny size but its radical structure.
4. Punctuate with a scalpel.
5. A microfiction begins in quotation marks and ends with ellipsis.
6. Verbs fly, nouns run, adjectives weigh down.
7. The temptation of the joke is the termite of microfiction.
8. Characters in a microfiction pass by in profile.
9. The microfiction needs brave readers, which is to say those who can put up with incompleteness.
10. The briefer it seems, the more slowly it is read.

Perhaps a few of these points merit elaboration or illustration, but I think I’d prefer to let them settle in their new language for a few days . . .