Very Short Stories

Reading Time: 3 Mins

I’ve been seeing #vss365 pop up on more tweets lately and knew it was a writing prompt of some sorts but wasn’t sure how to participate. I finally had the time yesterday to look into it and I was intrigued at what I found.

Kudos and thanks to Natalie Gasper for putting together this informative post with all the info I needed!

I like the idea of a daily writing prompt; something that gets your creative brain fired up without the daunting effort of editing or adding to the various WIPs. After all, that’s exactly what I get out of the Goebbels project.

I’m also a huge fan of short, flash fiction and I enjoy the challenge it presents: how do you make people care while using so few words?

Years ago I settled on 400 words as my optimum short fiction size. No more, no less. 400 words exactly.

Enough space to carve out a moment or two in time and create some real emotion while at the same time being incredibly helpful as an exercise in editing.

I may put a couple of those 400 words stories up on this site; they are just collecting e-dust in a file folder somewhere. I’ll have to dig those up.

So yesterday when I approached my first #vss365 post I did so with the anticipation that I would just carve out a quick scene, a moment in time, using the word of the day: division.

A small creative spark was lit and today, instead of creating a second scene or story with the new prompt, I found myself wanting to know more about the characters I had started with yesterday, and so I continued along with them.

I appreciate the challenge that coming up with a new story every day presents but, as with any kind of creative challenge, it’s also fun to subvert things a bit to suit your own needs.

So I’ll be taking a weekly approach to this little creative diversion and, over the course of seven days, I’ll write 400 word stories, never knowing which direction the next day’s word will take the characters and plot.

A new story will start every Monday and I’ll allow myself to miss a day here and there to help me through any troublesome words and also to try and nail that word count exactly. I’ll title it at the end of the story and post it here on the site.

I prefer to hashtag and repeat the word of the day at the end of the tweet as I find the hashtag in the middle of the story takes me out of it when I read them in other tweets, as good a job as it does of saving precious characters while composing. The hashtags are not counted in the wordcount, so for this week’s story I have 97 words down, 303 to go over the next five days.

A fun little exercise and just thought I’d write out my take on it all as it is a bit different than what I see others doing.

And, for the time it takes each day, it beats the hell out of doing the Wordle.