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Unpopular take: I don’t think microfiction illuminates atomic structure of long stories. They’re fun but more closely related to jokes. The essence of long story is compounding accumulation across the atoms.
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Realized from the answers that unconsciously I am thinking of serialized atoms. There’s no reason the atoms have to be continuous segments of text. Though I can’t think of a candidate counterexample. Maybe a thread?
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I’ve always liked this quote from EM Forster: “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. But “the king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. (Note in each case you need two events, not one, the atomic unit is the link, not the node)
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Character/actor, even if implied. "It was" is probably the shortest story ever, though we see the addition of another factor here, temporality. Robbe-Grillet mucked about with this
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