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microfiction story, the gaps are spaces for the reader to insert him- or herself and see the
situation through new eyes.

Another unexpected characteristic of a microfiction story is the intersection of a story’s
duration and the reader’s anticipation. Because a story is brief, it affects how much anticipation a
reader experiences. Irving asserts that the brevity of a microfiction story affects the reader’s
awareness of what is occurring. He says, “microfiction is particularly compelling due to its far
greater presence-to-text ratio than prototypical stories; readers, at least theoretically, could feel as
if they are present in the storyworld for perhaps the entirety of the microstory, thanks to its
extreme brevity” (Irving 7). However, although the reader might be more present in the story,
some believe he or she might experience a strange sense of disappointment. Adam Rovner has an
explanation for this experience. In his article “The Shape of Time in Microfiction: Alex Epstein
and the Search for Lost Time,” he discusses anticipation and microfiction stories. He says that a
microfiction story might feel anticlimactic to its audience because the story was not long enough
to build anticipation (115-116). The audience experienced a difficult situation and did not have
to wait long to see the story resolved. However, in the following stories, that does not prove to be
true. Microfiction stories can encourage audiences to anticipate the resolution to the story
because the idea of the situation is more compelling than the author’s written interpretation.

In the previous pages, this paper has sought to introduce microfiction, a subgenre within
the larger genre of flash fiction. Microfiction is not easy to define, but it does have some
common hallmarks: general characters and settings, extreme situations and plot twists, and, of
course, a brief experience. The brevity affects how much detailed information can enter into the
story and how much anticipation will build inside the reader through the story. In many cases,
the lack of information gives the reader an opportunity to infer his own experiences into the story

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