Writing flash stories makes me feel very productive. When I’m writing longer stories, I can almost never finish a story in a day. Today though, I wrote a flash story. Only 700 words, which isn’t a lot, but I still *feel* productive because it’s a finished story.
Got to spend the day on Sunday learning about short fiction from Terry Bisson as part of the Hugo House series of one day workshops (http://www.nwmediaarts.com/2007Event-Workshops.html). About a month ago I went to one of the other workshops in this series, where I learned about ‘middles’ from Connie Willis. Therefore, I was pleased when Terry announced that we would be learning about ‘beginnings’ and ‘endings.’ So in theory, I should be able to write a complete story now :) We also spent a lot of time on how to convey information using dialogue, which I found very helpful.
Some tidbits:
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So I had an idea that was rattling around in my head for a while, and I kept trying to mash it with other things, which wasn’t working very well. So instead of doing that I tried to boil the idea down to its very essence and write it as flash, which seemed to work. Flash is not really one of my strengths, so it will be interesting to see what other people think of it. Anyway, it was nice to get some actual writing done, as lately I’ve been doing photography and outlining, both of which are at least …
