Sunday, December 12, 2010

Fast Fiction

          To defeat the constant struggle with writer’s block I’ve been having lately, I have done some research and I’m determined to knock this damn dirty ape off of my back.
          Yesterday, Wil Wheaton tweeted about an intro he wrote for a book called “The Fast Fiction Challenge, Part 2” by Lee Barnett. Essentially, the Fast Fiction Challenge is where a writer is given a word, and within a designated timeframe, he or she must write a short fiction story that uses that word at some point. From my understanding Lee goes for exactly 200 words for every story that he writes. The end of that sentence marked 101 for me, so as you can see, it’s not much space to get the context of a story across to readers.
          Due to a discussion with my wife this evening I have decided that I’m going to give it a try here on my blog. My Monday blog will detail what I’ll be writing for my Friday entry; basically, I’ll give a word count because I want to vary it up. On Monday’s entry I want readers to comment and give me a word to use; common or uncommon I will use it in my Friday story. In the event that I get more than one word suggested, I will set up a poll on the site (once my wife teaches me how) and readers can vote until Thursday. Then on Friday my story will appear with the word being used and having the correct word count. Easy enough right? Now this will require a little reader participation, so hopefully that won’t be too much of an issue. Anonymous comments are enabled on my blog so anyone can leave one without having to log in.
          I thing this will be fun for me and I’m really looking forward to stretching out my creative muscles on this exercise. We’ll try it for a bit and if it works, great, and if not, I’ll move on. Blogs will be up like normal through the week, the only real change is that on Friday it will be a Fast Fiction.
          I hope some of you are as stocked about this as I am. That means that I have at least one entry per week where I don’t have to stress about content. This will help my sanity a bit I think.

I’m going to start this week of traditionally. I will do a 200 fast fiction that will post on Friday that includes a reader's word. Start commenting!

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