I’ve talked before about how I’m a administrator on Holly Lisle’s forums. I bring this up as a full disclosure regarding the following, lest someone take the following as being a shill for her classes.
So, I need to write three flash fiction tales so I can complete my Summer Of Fiction Writing goal and have one for Cat Gerlach’s final Indie Author Advent Calendar. I sat down tonight to work on them since I’m rapidly running out of month in order to reach my goal.
I went back to Holly’s free How To Write Flash Fiction That Doesn’t Suck course and went over the first lesson. In the lesson you come up with a list of people and potential problems they have. Then you write out the first third of the flash fiction, or about one hundred and fifty words.
I didn’t come up with the total number of people and problems like I should have. I have vague ideas of what I want in each story so I think I ended up with several variations of what I already had in mind for them.
I wrote the first three beginnings of the tales. I’m not sure that I’m happy with them.
I’m going to let them sit over night and look at them again in the morning. I may decide I like them, or perhaps have some insight into what is wrong.
I think the problem lies in that I had some vague ideas of how I wanted the stories to go and I’m trying to shoehorn them into the framework of Holly’s class. If I let go of my preconceived notions and just follow the lesson I’d probably get something better. No offense to my Muse, as she came up with the ideas in the first place. But since they weren’t complete ideas, like she usually gives me, this time I feel a little justified in taking a different approach to generating the stories.
If you have any leanings toward creating stories, either just for yourself, or for possible publication some day, I highly recommend taking Holly’s free flash fiction class. Flash fictions are short (Holly defines them as exactly five hundred (500) words long, others define them as anything under fifteen hundred (1500) words long) so they are an ‘easy win’. You aren’t trying to create a complex world like Tolkien’s Middle Earth, or write the Great American Novel. You’re trying to write what amounts to a single scene, with one person with a problem. It has a beginning, a middle and an end, just like any good story. They are (relatively) easy to write. And once you have one, you get a confidence boost that encourages your Muse to write more stories. If you are looking at eventually publishing, you can put ten of them together and put it up for sale on Amazon and other distributors.
Once you get the writing bug, Holly has other classes that can help you scratch that itch. Some are inexpensive and focus on a single area of writing, and others are big and expensive and cover big projects like writing or revising a novel.
I don’t get anything for recommending the classes, and I do believe they will help you if you are serious about putting in the effort, the time, and the perseverance to complete them. My first novel, Arthur Mace, Medieval Gumshoe, was revised according to Holly’s How To Revise Your Novel course. It didn’t turn out perfect, but it was a much better book when I published it than when I first wrote it.
Anyway, we’ll see how I feel about my stories tomorrow.
If you’d like to support my efforts, why not buy me a chocolate chip cookie through my Ko-Fi page? https://ko-fi.com/jhusum