The intent of most of these prompts is to get you started. This prompt should lead to an entire story in 5 minutes! Okay, it won't be War and Peace but it will have the essence of story: character, conflict and change.In Roberta Allen's Fast Fiction
her advice on how to do it is to just do it :-) And that it will get easier with practice.Set the timer for 5 minutes and turn off your conscious self. Select a prompt without thinking much about it. (There are 300 of them in the book. They are nearly all universal concepts and can be applied to any genre of fiction.) Then start writing.
(As always, if the timer goes off and you're on a roll, keep going. If you're done early, stop. The timer is intended to help you, not be a chain.) I suspect my first attempts at this are going to be rough since I like longer fiction!)
Write a story about a will.More
Write a story about glass.
Write a story about a disaster
Write a story about a view.
Write a story about something trivial.
Write a story about a rite.
Write a story about a fake.
Write a story about a riddle.
Write a story about a rule.
Write a story about a battle.
Write a story about a souvenir.
Write a story about a scar.
Write a story about a rogue.
Write a story about a holiday
Write a story about a fantasy.
Write a story about a demon.
Write a story about dread.
Write a story about hunting.
Write a story about a lie.
Write a story about something that really happened.
Write a story about an animal.
Write a story about an object that has been lost.
Write a story about leaving.
Write a story about a wish.
There's a genre of fiction that's expanded recently called short short fiction. Roberta Allen described it as stories you can read during the commercial break. (So with TiVo, is the next genre micro fiction we can read while we fast forward past the commercials ;-))
Character: If you need help with a character, here's some questions to ask. (You may only need to answer one question. They're all different ways of asking the same thing.)
- What does your character yearn for? (As Robert Olen Butler expresses it.)
- What does she desire more than anything else in the world?
- What does she fear losing more than anything else in the world?
- What does she want back that she lost?
- What is she conflicted about? In other words, what two incompatible things does she want?
Resolution: Then have something change by the end. (Maybe she gets it. Maybe she realizes she didn't need it. Maybe she realizes she can't ever have it.)
Quotes from Roberta Allen's Fast Fiction
"Before you do the exercises, you need to give up all your notions about writing well."
"Decide beforehand that whatever you put on the page will be okay. Give yourself freedom. Allow yourself to write whatever comes up. Some of the thoughts going through your mind may seem silly or nonsensical. Include them anyway. Let go of the critic before you start."
"Forget yourself. If you listen to the chatter in your mind, you are not fully engaged in the writing. If you have a goal, such as writing well, for example, you will interfere with the process by trying too hard. The last thing you want to do is try. Instead, let things happen. Don't impose your will. Don't take charge."
"The last thing you want to do in the beginning is judge your work. This doesn't mean that judgment plays no part in the process. I does, but not in the beginning and not in the usual sense. What you will be judging is energy rather than quality and you will only do that after you've finished writing."
2 comments:
I’m going to try an experiment. I’m going to do these 5 minute stories and send them out raw. Okay, I’ll fix spelling! — so others can read them — and so I don’t get too embarrassed! And then I’ll ramble a bit on how to work with what flowed out.
Let’s see if I get any better after a week or so.
Dordrenna fingered the scar that ran the length of her cheek. She wished it had never happened, of course, but the scar had become a sort of reminder to her not to trust anyone.
When the man entered into the tavern she eyed him warily her fingers itching at her knife. He looked about, scanning the busy crowd. Her eyes rested on him and wanted to remain there though she knew it did not serve her. When his traveling gaze came to hers, it stopped and held hers. He approached.
Crap, she thought. He was easy to look at but she shouldn’t have.
“Dordrenna?” the man asked.
“Yes,” she said, hesitantly, caught off guard. How did he know her name?
“I have a message from your mother,” he said. “My name is Eldrick. She says I’m your father.”
Dordrenna felt the world shift beneath her.
Okay, it came to a climax but not a conclusion. What’s the conflict? Well, I had no idea who the guy was until he came up to her and “father” popped into my head. Hmm, maybe I’ll ramble on and work on it a bit …
So maybe he gave her the scar and scarred her further by leaving? (I’d have to change the part where he says “She says I’m your father.”) Hopefully he scarred her accidentally! Or maybe like in “A Boy Named Sue” he did it to make her tough.
So I’d need to pack a whole backstory into a single sentence:
Dordrenna fingered the scar along her cheek that her father had given her as a parting gift …
Dordrenna fingered the scar along her cheek, a parting gift from her father before he left her and her mother twenty years ago.
Bit wordy. Could use some work. Or, maybe to add more drama:
Dordrenna fingered the scar along her cheek, a parting gift from her father before she and her mother fled from him nearly twenty years ago.
But her mother sent him to her — though I could change that — but if I don’t, what good explanations is there for him to have scarred her?
Maybe she had a mark on her cheek … maybe there’s a prophecy about a Chosen One …
Hmm. Well, it has possibilities! It might be too much story for a little bitty thing but that could be the challenge of it!
Dordrenna drained her mug of ale as she waited in the tavern for the merchant who had hired her team to guard his shipment. She dragged the back of her calloused hand over her wet lips then across the scar on her cheek. It was a parting gift from her father before she and her mother fled from him nearly twenty years ago into a nervous existence at the fringes of the empire ruled by the demon king.
Finally, a month ago, after nearly fifty years, the demon king had fallen to the arrow of The Marked One just as the prophecies had foretold. Dordrenna and her friends had taken advantage of the ensuing chaos to hire themselves out as escorts. It was the first steady income she and her mother had enjoyed in their twenty years of hiding.
A man entered the tavern. A splotch of red marked his cheek. Blood perhaps? His gaze edged through the crowded tavern like a tower guard seeking aberrance hinting at danger. His clothes were dark and lived-in unlike the merchants who stupidly wore their wealth like banners. When his traveling gaze came to hers it stopped. He approached.
“Dordrenna?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said taking on the wariness he had brought with him. She sucked in her breath. That mark on his cheek wasn’t blood. It was The Mark.
“Your mother told me you would be here. I’m your father. Now that the demon king has been destroyed I can tell you why you needed to flee twenty years ago and why I needed to remove the mark on your cheek that matched mine. May I sit?”
That took about an hour. So I guess I won’t be doing that for each one just the ones that really grab me! Dordrenna didn’t come much alive so could use more work but I liked her father :-)
Endre carefully scored the sheet of glass with the blade. Then grasping it in his gloved hands he broke the piece off and placed it in the stack next to him. There were only three days before the opening of the church and he needed to finish this piece, the greatest piece he’d ever been commissioned to do, before then.
As he concentrated on how quickly he must work, the blade slipped and he scarred the glass and ruined that section. Endre sat back. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. He needed to focus on the glass, not on how short a time he had.
Opening his eyes, Endre concentrated on the blade touching the glass and drawing it across cleanly. There was nothing else in the world but blade touching glass. There was nothing in the world but to travel that line.
[Timer ran out.]
Opening his eyes, Endre touched blade to glass. There was nothing else in the world but blade touching glass. There was nothing in the world but to travel that line from one end to the other. He drew the blade across.
And there was the final piece. The apprentices came to whisk away the pieces to set them in the frame.
Well, that probably demonstrates my near complete ignorance of stained glass construction. But that’s what popped into my mind when I saw glass and I’d have to do research to make it believable. Probably design is more important than cutting.
Oh, wait, I was picturing Endre as a master. Maybe he’s an apprentice and a master is not-so-patiently waiting for the final piece to be cut. And there’s an apprentice hovering too, waiting for the piece. I like that better. More tension and perhaps could be reworked to even make sense.
As far as the energy that Roberta Allen said to look for, I like “Endre touched blade to glass. There was nothing else in the world but blade touching glass. There was nothing in the world but to travel that line from one end to the other. He drew the blade across.”
At least I got to the conflict this time and it comes to a conclusion.
Joyce
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