Unpeaceable (2014)

Сюжет кино: What speed does history travel at? What is the rhythm of humanity? What sort of chapters best capture the pace of life? What types of stories are most suited to a world where a quarter of the world seems to live on the Internet, and three-quarters are struggling with food and shelter? We're told it's the height of literary crime to break a reader's absorption, but what if we want to convey an unpeaceful reality? What if we want to provoke thought rather than entertain?
Look at Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. It's a collection of integrated stories about two Native-American men and their relationships and histories. Among the stories Alexie includes dream sequences, flashbacks, diary entries, and poetic passages. The chapters focus on different characters, thereby decentralizing the perspective and facilitating a human examination of an issue. Louise Erdrich also uses chapters narrated by different characters to show the inter-connectedness of a small group of Chippewa.
Vignettes and other short forms
A vignette is short – often one to four paragraphs, and it is more about communicating meaning than plot. It tends to give a sharp impression about a single thing, person, event or issue, and often takes place in a single moment. In the Spanish speaking world there is a fascination with vignettes, or what they refer to as “micro-stories”. Vignettes have a gamut of close relatives, including of course flash fiction, short short stories, micro narratives, and sudden fiction. There is even Twitter fiction, at 140 characters. The differences aren't too important for the purposes of this essay, though flash fiction does tend to be longer and have some kind of plot (obstacles, conflict, a changing character).
Then there are other short, thoughtful texts that can be played with, or incorporated into longer works, such as riddles, lateral thinking puzzles (hybrids of stories and puzzles that challenge assumptions and preconceptions), news briefs, parables (didactic stories with a lesson), epitaphs, and aphorisms.
“The micro-story rose with the idea of being read in one go, like a shot of whiskey drunk in one gulp. You feel the burning in your throat first, and afterwards in the stomach. The same sensation should stay in the memory of the reader,” said Spanish writer Gines Cutillas (my translation).
Every word counts in these shorter stories, and in vignettes, even the title has an important roll to play. It can be a comment, label, or description, and often alters the story's meaning and its reception. In Galeano's works, the title is often a paratext that forms a frame for the vignette.
Vignettes as tiny essays, story placards, postcards of injustice, single-image stories, little wisps of big ideas.
Story weaving and the art of story contrast
When I learned about Francisco Goya's The Third of May 1808 painting in school, I never realized what an impact it would have on my writing as an adult. To show the French soldiers slaughtering Spanish citizens, Goya put a rigid firing squad on one side – the rifles in line, their single duplicated posture creating a faceless force, and on the other he put the disorganized captives, with faces. The contrast is intense and thought provoking, and you can do the same thing with little stories. You can cause questions with the way you weave your stories. I wrote about police raiding a poor home in the one vignette, and then US soldiers patrolling an Iraqi street in the next.