A daily freewriting exercise for flash fiction.
A daily freewriting exercise for flash fiction.
I have tried my hand at fiction regularly over the course of my life. There are undoubtedly notebooks full of first chapters packed away in boxes at my dad's. Dozens of my earliest stories were abandoned after a single session when the itch to create worlds ebbed at the sound of the middle school lunch bell. I think I made enough of those early attempts to develop a fear of the medium. This trepidation lasted for a decade or more, always at odds with the desire to give it another go.
During the "back to school" years of my mid-20s, I found myself with a lot of downtime. Classes spread throughout the day left hours-long breaks in between. These were tough stretches often spent in empty cafeterias or at the watering hole across the road from my academic building. Where better to write than a barstool?
One thing I learned in the years bridging my childhood attempts and adulthood was that I work well with constraints. This is something other folks with attention deficit issues might relate to. With that in mind, I developed a structure that would encourage writing during finite chunks of time—a framework without the pressure of obligation, but with enough barriers to channel my focus into something complete. Initially, I wanted something akin to a diary, but my mundane existence as a commuting student felt like too limited a scope. Flash fiction felt like the most appropriate medium. No definite word count, but certainly short enough to draft in one sitting. This was the genesis of the idea.
As an added constraint and to get the juices flowing, I leveraged Michael Fogleman's Random Two-Word Phrases generator. Of the options there, I found the non-alliterative Noun + Noun method the most interesting. To push myself, I always chose the first pair.
Allotting myself at least 15 minutes, I'd write. The only goal was to include the word combination from the generator in some capacity and to have an ending. The expectation was not to write something good, just to write.
Of the stories I composed in the first two weeks, I thought two were strong enough to revisit. I consider that a win. Years later, I returned to several of those stories and polished them up. And while I've kept those close to my chest, I have shared my approach to flash fiction with some friends who caught the writing bug. Enough of them have taken something from it that I'm sharing it now with you.
To summarize, here are the instructions:
In my experience, stories will range from 200–800 words but your mileage may vary. Happy writing.