With the fiction and the story telling so arbitrary, I find myself in the same position as many a writer in the post Nouveau Roman world : fiction does not make sense. It is meant to build sense - but the foundations of any fiction work are laid on air. From the basic commercial product to the high moral fable, only relativity and void surround any fictional production.
This issue is, unfortunately, unsolvable -lest we go back to the Marxist conception of cultural manifestations as by-products of ideology. But it is possible to work around it. The likes of Oulipo or Raymond Carver showed us the way : constraint, as a unmasked form of arbitrariness.
My initial constraint will be minimal : my stories will contain no more than 3,000 words. I will build them as I would a novel, researching characters, places and plots, developing backgrounds, structuring the narration in scenes and subplots. This done, the writing will consist in fitting all this material in the pre-defined format.
This will favour the emergence of a visually extremely dense and striking style, concentrating all manners of formal tools and figures in order to achieve maximum efficiency. Should the 3,000 words format prove too diluted again, we will reduce it accordingly. The expected result is a prose resembling poetry as closely as possible, whilst retaining its primary purpose of story-telling.
