How to Write 280-Character Micro-Fiction That Lands

Every scene in Zombie Tweet has to fit in 280 characters. That includes the setup, the joke and enough detail for a player to make a choice. Writing 72 of them taught us more about short fiction than any rulebook did, so here is what worked.

A quick bit of background first. Twitter launched with a 140-character limit and doubled it to 280 for most languages in November 2017. X still uses 280 as the standard limit for free accounts. Paying subscribers can post far longer texts, but 280 is what most feeds are built around.

Pick one moment, not a plot

A 280-character story has room for roughly 45 to 55 words. That is enough for one moment. It is nowhere near enough for a beginning, a middle and an end told in order.

So choose the moment where something is about to change. In our game, the mail carrier scene works because the whole situation is in one picture: a zombie at your door holding a package with your name on it. The reader fills in the rest.

If you catch yourself writing "first," "then" and "finally," you are summarizing a longer story. Throw out everything except the most interesting second.

Start as late as you can

Most first drafts open with setup: "It was the third day of the outbreak and Sam was running low on supplies." That sentence uses 75 characters and tells the reader nothing they will remember.

Try opening on the action or the strange detail instead. "The vending machine still glows" is a better first line than any explanation of how the power stayed on. Readers are very good at catching up. Give them something odd and they will build the world around it.

A useful test: delete your first sentence. If the story still makes sense, leave it deleted.

Make the nouns do the work

Adjectives are expensive in micro-fiction. "A large, scary, intimidating zombie" costs 36 characters and paints a blurry picture. "A zombie in a wedding dress" costs 27 and paints a sharp one.

Specific nouns carry a whole set of associations with them. A cricket bat says something about the person holding it that "a weapon" never could. Mrs. Patel from 4B, holding a casserole in one hand and a cricket bat in the other, needs no description of her personality.

Verbs work the same way. "Shuffles" needs no "slowly."

Cut the filler words

Once you have a draft, you will almost always be over the limit. These are the cuts we make first:

"Very," "really," "just," "quite" and "suddenly," which rarely add anything.
"There is" and "there are" at the start of sentences. "There is a dog outside your door" becomes "A dog sits outside your door."
"Begin to" and "start to." Characters don't start to run. They run.
Repeated information. If you said the store is empty, you don't need the zombie to notice it is empty.

Contractions help as well. "Do not" to "don't" saves a character every time, and it usually sounds more natural.

Count the way X counts

If you plan to post your story, count it the way the platform does. X counts most letters, numbers, spaces and punctuation as one character each. Emoji and characters from scripts such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean count as two. Any link counts as 23 characters, however long or short the address really is.

That last rule matters if your story points to something. A link at the end eats 23 characters plus a space, so your actual story budget is 256. Our game's share text accounts for this: it counts the link as 23 and trims the post if it runs over.

Leave a gap for the reader

The best micro-fiction leaves out the most important thing and trusts the reader to supply it. A famous example is the six-word story "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." It is often credited to Ernest Hemingway, but researchers have found no evidence he wrote it, and versions of it appeared in newspapers decades earlier. Whoever wrote it, it works because it never says what happened.

Zombie stories make this easy, because everyone already knows the genre. You don't have to explain the outbreak, the rules or the danger. You can spend all your characters on the one thing that is new, like a zombie book club or a penguin leading a horde down Main Street.

Humor follows the same rule: set up the expectation and stop just after you break it.

End on an image or a turn

Weak endings in short fiction tend to explain the point: "And that was when Sam realized friendship mattered more than food." Strong endings either leave a picture in the reader's head or flip what came before.

Compare these two closers for the same scene:

"The zombies were confused by the water, so the escape worked."
"The zombies stop at the shoreline, stumped by the concept of water."

The second one gives you an image, and it is funnier because it treats the zombies as baffled rather than dangerous.

Another reliable trick is a final line that changes the meaning of the first. A scene that opens with someone screaming for help from a dumpster turns when the next line reveals a phone on a selfie stick.

A simple practice routine

If you want to get better at this, write a lot of very short drafts and edit them hard. A routine that works for us:

Pick a prompt: an object, a place and a problem. For example, "a tandem bike, a hospital parking lot, a flat tire."
Write the story with no limit at all, in under five minutes.
Cut it to 280 characters. Then cut it to 200, just to see what you lose.
Read both versions aloud and keep whichever one sounds more like a person talking.

You will often find the 200-character version is better. When it isn't, the extra 80 characters tell you exactly which details were carrying the story.

Try it in a game

Interactive micro-fiction adds one more constraint: the reader has to be able to act. A good game scene ends with a clear decision, so the last sentence should make the options obvious without listing them. "The pantry door is right behind them" sets up a sneaking choice without saying "you could sneak."

To see how that plays out across a whole run, play Zombie Tweet and watch the character counter in the corner of each scene. Then write your own scene in the same format and send it to us.