About the Vignettes

According to Wikipedia vignettes (in literature) are "short, impressionistic scenes that focus on one moment or give a particular insight into a character, idea, or setting". I've always loved this very short form, which is not to be mistaken with the short story (which is generally much longer!). You can find vignettes with not too many authors, but Franz Kafka, Daniel Charms, Ernst Bloch ("Traces") and Theodor W. Adorno ("Minima Moralia") come to my mind. I was basically inspired by John Cage's own Indeterminacy stories (also serialized on my blog) to write my very own. John Cage's concept was to tell short stories or impressions that could be read within a single minute. He performed the stories with musical accompaniment and would read slower or faster depending on the length of the story to fit into the 1-minute-limit. The stories were to be artless omitting any embellishment, but they often have punch lines of a sort. I've been trying something similar: tell it without any fancy phrasing, omit details that are not necessary for the point of the story and make the point easily understandable. I've noticed that keeping to these rules my vignettes only express the mere skull of a story, not the actual experience itself. In every case I could have extended and explained many details, but suppressed my urge to do so. My main thought was to tell an anecdote as if I were telling it to my friends at a dinner party or at the pub. In such cases you usually stick to the basics of a story, and then others drop in to comment or to tell their own version of the same incident. Sometimes even one of the participants of a story might be present. This way I have an enormous pool of things to tell. An idea of mine was that by the end of each day there'd be at least one story to tell. Due to lack of time I'm not able to produce the stories so often, but I'll try to write as many as I can...