The Hyperfiction Short-Short Stories of John Oakley McElhenney

I stumbled along Mr. McElhenney’s hyperfiction universe a few weeks ago, and the effect has been eye-opening. Here is a full system of fiction that is untethered from the physical book, bookstore, even ebook that we’ve come to expect from novelists.

McElhenney upends that entire metaphor and turns it into something more “digital native.” If writers, novelists and poets, in particular are looking to build more of a following, excite and entire more readers, the traditional book, traditional publishing models simply do not hold.

So, McElhenney has taken his own writing, exporations, and publishing into a new dimension.

image, audio, video snippets, texts, emails, voicemails, transcripts, ai-reviews, ai-collaborations are all part of Mr. McElhenney’s universe of content and storytelling. The deeper you get into his world(s) the more his ideas begin to make sense.

In McElhenney’s own words, if a story grabs your attention (web, video, text, photograph) it provides an opportunity for a conversation. The reader and the writer become enmeshed in imagery, imagination of what things and people might look like, and the voices used by each character, most writers simply write from a. inspired opening scenese and prose > b. the messy middle > c. the climax > d. denoumont.

John Oakley McElhenney has realigned the content with the reader’s preferred format or platform. Instagram? Sure, McElhenney is actively pushing that channel. TikTok? Yes, more recent, and with uneven results. Facebook? 100% FB is my distribution channel for all of my creative and marketing work. LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, all the others… McElhenney is pushing the boundaries within the framework of these different modes of communication.

Previously, I’ve only been focused on McElhenney’s Hyperfiction Opus, Icarus Ascending. Today, I’m going to pick five choice short-short stories from McElhenney’s two books, Interleaved Letter Sequences and Words, Language and Innovation.