If you need a little help to get you started on the road to becoming a published writer, or just a little inspirational workout to get your creative juices flowing again - then this is the place for you.
Under various headings, and helpful articles, you'll find prompts or exercises designed to aid you in your quest.
The Academy is intended for all apprentice writers, and should be fun and beneficial for writers of any level of experience.
Got writer's block? Take a break from your current project and have a go at Flash Fiction, using The Word of the Day as a prompt - just for fun. That should cure the block. Keep writing!
I’m sure there are many writers, technically proficient, who can write just about anything to order - and do so well, but it’s my firm belief that the better writing is fed by passion.
Whatever you write, you have to catch the reader’s attention; you have to make your article, essay or novel, interesting - capable of carrying the reader along as the story unfolds, making him or her want to read till the very end.
A popular author writes what people want to read - as an author, make sure you want to write it in the first place. Explore the unexplored, even if this is merely another angle to your own story. You know what happened - but what if you took a different route; caught that plane that crashed; accepted a lift from the good-looking stranger? ‘What ifs’ are good places to start.
I read somewhere that fiction is on the whole based on real life. But what if this is a science fiction story set in the outer reaches of a far-off galaxy, populated by beings akin to Dr. Who’s alien monsters? Yes, even then! However fantastic the setting and the characters, try listening to the dialogue and watch the interaction. All too human - because that is what we know.
Whatever we write, we are going to draw on something stored in our memories, even borrowed memories, which we then re-work using our imagination - or our knowledge of the subject. The most ordinary of lives is not at all ordinary when the layers are peeled back. What is ordinary, after all? An approximation of the average life? I’ve yet to meet anyone who has led one of these average, or ordinary, lives. Have you?
Every life is resplendent with stories; yours and mine. Telling it as it is, was, might be or might have been; it all has an element of truth in it - so are we storytellers or truth tellers - or an amalgamation of both? I favour the latter.
Isabel Allende asks (from a Jewish saying) ‘What is truer than truth?’ The answer is ‘the story’. The following link is to one of her inspiring speeches, ‘Tales of Passion‘: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/204 It’s well worth listening to!
Sometimes the lie that we fabricate from some small truth, is necessary in order to write a piece of fiction which allows a greater truth to be told.
Ten minute exercise: Take a seemingly everyday event of your youth and lie through your teeth: make it an interesting story that might have happened, if circumstances had been different - if anything had been different. But - write from the heart.
My introduction to Flash Fiction was accidental in more ways than one. I’d hit the ‘doldrums’ with a thud, following a car accident and subsequent virtual imprisonment in my own living room. Nothing would flow from my pen and the laptop screen remained blank. I should have been able to wing my way out of there in my imagination, but that wheelchair had me firmly clamped to terra firma. Dire straits for a writer.
Stina, my daughter and writing buddy, to the rescue! She gave me short writing prompts, with orders to write 300 word stories. I count the experience - which saw me claw my way back up and out of that word-less void - as my accidental - or fortuitous - introduction to Flash Fiction.
I was surprised to read, on one website, that Flash Fiction is anything between 300-1000 words long. I would argue that as being too long to qualify. As an example, MsLexia runs a Flash Fiction competition with an upper word limit of 150 words. It can be done. See www.mslexia.co.uk .
Allowing upwards of a thousand words seems to me to be the equivalent of suggesting that a Haiku can be a full-blown Ballad.
Elsewhere I read that some ‘purists’ would claim a 75 word limit, yet others that 100 words should be the maximum. Personally I think that a piece of Flash Fiction can work very well in 150 words or so, but to allow a little lee-way, we’ll go with the 250 word limit.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the low word limit gives you an excuse for fragmented storytelling. The challenge lies in writing a complete story in a few words - complete with a beginning, middle and end - and to make every word count.
Unless you are well versed in writing Flash Fiction, I would suggest that you write the story first - then pare it down, cutting out every unnecessary word, including every adjective and adverb (at least most of them). Then re-read it - out loud if possible. Does it still make sense? Do a word count. Need more editing? Erase or delete every word that is not necessary to the story.
Jorge Luis Borges said ‘My shortest story has the heart of a poem, the mind of a novel.’
Now for the shortest of Short Flash fiction stories; arguably the world’s shortest horror story:‘The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door.’ (Anonymous)
Do you think it works?
Prompts for Flash Fiction:
Using the Word of the Day, generated automatically on this site, write a piece of Flash Fiction in no more than 250 words.Each day should generate a new word (if it's an adjective or adverb, it has to be kept in).