I’ve previously written about flash fiction: stories of 1,000 words or less, I even included a few versions of my efforts in the subsection of it – micro fiction (100 words), and sudden fiction (750 words) elsewhere on this here site somewhere.
Today I thought I’d try a different version of ‘flash fiction’ – although I’m sure there’s a different term for it ‘speed writing’ perhaps.
The background: Halloween is coming, ten days from now, and later this week I’m going to read a short at a story tellers evening. I’ve only ever done that once before and it was an interesting experience: I don’t consider myself a voice artist (In another era the term ‘piss artist’ was more common…), but I’m also going to be doing a radio interview in a fortnight’s time, where I’ve been asked to choose one of my stories to read: choice TBC.
So, while I have a number of stories which could be considered ‘of the mood’ to fit for a Halloween themed evening, I thought I’d try something different and write a short with a specific Halloween theme: and to get it written in time for the reading on Thursday. Recently I’ve had some success with writing at speed, to meet required deadline: my short story ‘The Five Votive Candles of Joe Wray‘ was written in five days to meet the deadline for ‘Burning‘: published two days ago, and currently available for a mere 99 pence opening special offer…in that case I ended up writing 24k words in five days, before spending roughly the same length of time editing it down to fit the 13k maximum length.
Today I thought I’d try something more extreme: I’m going to give myself a strict 3 hour period to write the new story, and 1 hour to edit. I have no idea if it’ll work at all or what state it will be in by the end of that time; at the moment I have a title, a basic idea, and…well, that’s about it.
From 9 o’clock this morning, a strict three hour boundary, so hopefully by this afternoon, I’ll have something to report back on…
When the organising for STC is over, I’d love to look at this Simon…the idea that is! Not the post. I’m looking to share it on Facebook if I can.