Short Takes: Tim Sevenhuysen, Creator of fiftywordstories.com, on Writing Effective Microfiction
- joannanorland
- Feb 21
- 4 min read
Updated: Feb 25
The tales may be short, but Tim Sevenhuysen’s romance with the fifty-word story is epic.
In 2009, Tim founded fiftywordstories.com and committed to posting a story of exactly fifty words every day for a year – his spin on the then-popular “post a daily photograph” challenge.
Gradually, he attracted a following and started inviting friends to post their contributions. Then, he opened the site to the public for submissions.
Flash forward 15 years (flash fiction style), and the forum is more vibrant than ever -- free both to read and submit -- with 1,000 subscribers and a pool of several hundred submissions a month.
Posting two stories a day, corresponding with authors, and selecting a story of the week, month and year makes for a busy avocation for the Vancouver Island-based data scientist and dad.
The pay offs?
For starters, witnessing the writers grow, in number and skill.
“The first few years,” he said, “there was a small group of authors who were at the top consistently. But if you look back over the last few years, the winners have not been repeating. It's been new people, joining all the time. The ceiling is high, but the floor keeps rising.”
He particularly enjoys spotting talented newcomers – for example, Paul D’Arcy, whose searing rookie submission, Still Life, took the prize as Story of the Year in 2025.
“When someone is just getting into writing and they offer something strong, I get to celebrate that with them, and give them that little boost in confidence,” Tim said. “They seem genuinely excited, especially if it's a first for them, or early in their writing career.”
Conversely, he feels a pang when “a repeat author submits several months in a row, not quite breaking through.”
What would he like to tell them, to coach them make the leap?
First off, you need raw material, so get into the habit of building up a stash of ideas.
“People always ask how do you get ideas,” Tim said. “I say – let the ideas come to you. Ideas come when you aren’t expecting them. The harder part is holding onto an idea. So make sure to write it down or log it to your phone right away, so you can work with it later.”
Working with an idea means patiently digging for the meaning beneath the surface.
Tim regretfully passes on submissions that consist of a sequence of events – no matter how interesting or dramatic – if “we’re not given something to think about or to feel. We need an idea to muse on, something strong or meaningful to take away.”
Meaning unfolds more powerfully through narrative movement, rather than a static description.
“There has to be something in the story that hints at what came before and what is coming after, like a little bit of motion blur, in photography,” Tim said.
Cartwheeling Mama by Rita Riebel Mitchell, for example, vaults across a decade of motherhood, conveying the protagonist’s yearning for her lost youth – all in a single, driving sentence.
In such stories, we are left with “a unique insight into what it means to be human” – or even better, an unsettling question about the nature of the human experience.
Tim wants to give his readers space “to decide for themselves what something means. Here's a situation, and you want to know what decision the characters are going to make, and the reader also gets to decide, how do I feel? What would I do? And what should I do?”
Readers chew over such stories slowly, probing their implications – as is evident in the thread of responses to Tim’s 2024 nugget, New Stars.
This enigmatic quality also marks Tom’s personal favourite, One Job Away From Retirement by Guy Preston. (Spoiler Alert! Please go read the story, and then come back for Tim’s take.)
“The last sentence twists,” Tim said. “Can you figure out who the speaker is, before you get to the word “scythe”? Good luck to you! And then you have to re-read the whole thing and get a totally different perspective. At the end, you are left with that question: If this was me and there was a woman I loved so much that I don't want to let her go by allowing her to die, what would I do? What is the right thing to do? What should I do? It’s not a ground breaking theme -- that if you love someone, you let them go — but the fantasy setting makes it feel fresh. There is so much to take away and it’s executed so well, with the ascending series of clues as to what’s going on.”
Hearing Tim analyse an exemplar lays bare his motivation for the entire venture, I tell him: He loves his genre, the way a connoisseur relishes fine wine.
He agrees.
“The beauty of a 50 word story is that if it’s effective, you can easily write 500 words about it. But if you try one and it fails, so what? That's okay because there’s always the next one.”
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PS: Are you struggling to meet the tight 50 word limit? I used these tips from Fifty-Word Stories, Volume One by Tim Sevenhuysen to pare down my December, 2025 story of the month, Holiday Cards, She Thinks Icily . . .. Give them a go.
Remove whole sentences, or parts of sentences. Reread to see if the thrust of your story remains.
When writing dialogue, you can often remove tags such as “he said” or “she said” while retaining clarity.
Use contractions.
The word “that” can often be deleted to tighten a sentence. For example, “I saw that it was green” condenses to “I saw it was green.”
Develop a broad vocabulary so that you can draw on specific words to replace a combo, e.g. “propelled,” instead of “moved forward.”
Exploit the title to set up or modify the meaning of the story.
It can be painstaking work at first, but as you nip and shave, you develop focus and agility that you can apply to everything you write.
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Tim Sevenhuysen is the author of Fifty-Word Stories, Volume One and Volume Two, and creator of www.fiftywordstories.com
Click here to subscribe to his site and here for submission guidelines.
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Joanna Norland is an author and writing coach with a microfiction addiction. Join my mailing list for tips, thoughts on writing and info about my programs.
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