Flash Fiction of a Different Kind: An exercise: Part 1

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…