In the interview that Sam Ligon had with Katrina Hays, he expressed the way he felt about writing short-short fiction in a great way. While doing the interview at first, he began to talk about how it would be stupid for him to even think about trying to write a short-short because he wrote long novels. He couldn’t see how someone could possibly get their point across in 300 words which is what he was asked to do. His first initial reaction was to say that he wasn’t going to do it and that it was a stupid thing to even ask for him to do. Then he began to think about it more and decided that he might as well try it and he was able to write a piece that was 600 words. Then he started thinking about what he had to do to make that 600 words lower down to only 300 words. He realized that the pressure of the constraint completely changed the lines that he had written. So taking away half of the words that he had written down in the first place, completely changed the story he was writing. The syntax changed the voice and the narrative of the story. He then realized that, that story never would have been able to happen without the pressure of constraint. He went on to talk about how, when he was writing in the short form, he began to get into stories that were a lot different than what he was used to. He finds that the beauty in a short-short is that it can be all about voice. However, he believes that almost all short-shorts fail. Some people just don’t get emotionally invested in the story before it ends.
