FlashFlood Advent Calendar 2018: Day 25

Day 25: Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas....

For our last writing prompt in the 2018 Flash Flood Advent Calendar, we're putting ourselves first...literally.

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Write a story in which the main character is you, but everything else in the story (setting, characters, situations) is fictional.  It's up to you whether you simply want to write yourself into a circumstance that just happens to be different from your life, or whether you prefer to go down the Alice-in-Wonderland you-finding-yourself-in-an-unexpected-place route.

If you'd like an extra challenge, use 'joy' as a theme, and give your story a happy ending.  Try to avoid a conclusion that's trite, pat, predictable, twee, or mawkish.  (Did we mention that this is a challenge?)

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Thank you so much for writing with us during these past 25 days.  If you have a moment, we would love to know what you thought of these prompts, and your thoughts on NFFD in general.  If you could take a moment to fill out this short survey, we would be very grateful.

Have a wonderful holiday season and a brilliant 2019.  Happy writing!

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Find out more about National Flash Fiction Day at our website or get in touch if you'd like to learn more about how you can get involved.

 

FlashFlood Advent Calendar 2018: Day 24

 

Day 24: Silent Night...

It's Christmas Eve, and for those celebrating Christmas, it can be a time of many things...family and loneliness, serenity and stress, quiet and chaos, joy and grief, and pretty much everything in between.  And for those not marking the holiday, there is plenty of traffic and bustle and Slade to put up with.

In today's prompt, we're going to take a step away from it all and think about something that it is easy to get too little (or too much) of this time of year: silence.

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Write a story or scene in which two people have a conversation, but at least one never makes a noise.  It's your choice whether you want to replace speech with other forms of communication, or just relegate the quiet character's talking to the off-camera moments.  Just make sure there is no direct speech (dialogue reported word-for-word in quotation marks) or reported speech (the narrator or author summarising what the character said) within the piece.

For an extra challenge, write an entire story involving more than one person in the same place, with no speaking whatsoever -- on or off camera. 

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We have one more prompt for you tomorrow, but in the meantime, if you've enjoyed these prompts, please consider making a donation to National Flash Fiction Day to support future events.  NFFD is volunteer-run and the new team is actively seeking ways to keep the project going in 2019 and beyond.  Any support, not matter how modest, is a great help.

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Find out more about National Flash Fiction Day at our website or get in touch if you'd like to learn more about how you can get involved.

FlashFlood Advent Calendar 2018: Day 23

Day 23: Making Beautiful Scenes from Radishes

The Night of the Radishes (Noche de Los Rábanos) is an annual event taking place on the 23rd of December in the Market Square of Oaxaca, Mexico where artisans make and display beautiful scenes out of carved radishes. 

Can we take some radishes of our own and shape them into something surprising and beautiful?

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Find some writing that you did for any purpose other than creative expression.

This could be a shopping list, job application, essay, half-finished letter, financial report or note to your family or housemates requesting that they put their dishes in the dishwasher instead of leaving them in the sink.

Have a read over it and use its words to craft a story.  You may add words, but challenge yourself to add as few as possible.

If you want an extra challenge, don't add any words; craft your story by rearranging the words you've already written.

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If you'd like to share the flash fiction love, consider purchasing one of our past anthologies for a friend or loved one.  Print versions are available from the NFFD Bookshop, as are links to Amazon where you can purchase ebooks.

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Find out more about National Flash Fiction Day at our website or get in touch if you'd like to learn more about how you can get involved.

FlashFlood Advent Calendar 2018: Day 22

Day 22: Story Sketches

One of the most exciting elements of flash is the way whole worlds can be suggested with broad strokes and a few carefully chosen details.  In today's prompt, we're going to play with writing loose and free, making sketches with our words.

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Part 1

Tell a story with the bare minimum of fussiness and elaboration.  Set yourself a timer for no more than five minutes (and you're very welcome to go shorter if you're feeling brave), and get the bones of a story down on paper.

Instead of seeing this as merely an outlining of a story, try to imagine yourself as the flash equivalent of a sketch artist: you have a limited time to capture the essence of a moment or scene, and you're choosing this fast and gestural approach on purpose.  Embrace the omissions and the playfulness of your quickly-drawn lines.

You are welcome to use the art provided as a starting point, or begin with a blank canvas, whatever you prefer.

This exercise works wonderfully if you're people-watching or picking up snippets of overheard conversation.  It can also be a useful tool when approaching a longer story that isn't quite working; if you put your draft aside and write a quick gestural version of it, you may discover something new about what's at its heart, or at least what about it interests you the most.

Once you're done with Part 1, you can, for an extra challenge, move on to...

Part 2

Once you have a sketch, you can transform it into something different by choosing elements to colour and texture...elements that might not otherwise have been the primary focus.

Play around with your Part 1 sketch by adding or accenting a detail or feature that was not the primary focus in the first draft.  This may pull the piece in a different direction or change its focus.  Be open to whatever might happen and have fun!

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If you enjoy writing to visual prompts, here are a few places to check out:

• For quick, gestural writing (you're not meant to take more than an hour in your writing and editing), check out Visual Verse (where submissions are open from the 1st to the 15th of each month).  

• If your flash sidles into prose poetry territory -- or even full-on poetry (we won't tell!), you might be interested in Rattle's monthly Ekphrastic Challenge (with an upcoming 31 December deadline for this month).

• If you'd prefer to choose your own visual prompts, The Ekphrastic Review's guidelines says they would love to see more prose, including micro, flash and shorter fiction, that is about or inspired by art. 

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The artwork for today's prompt was created by writer and artist Jeanette Sheppard.  We've got some wonderfully exciting news to share about Jeanette in the near future, but in the meantime, do check out her beautiful website at jeanettesheppard.com, or catch up with her on Twitter @InkLinked for writing and @JinnySketches for art.

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Find out more about National Flash Fiction Day at our website or get in touch if you'd like to learn more about how you can get involved.

FlashFlood Advent Calendar 2018: Day 21

Day 21: Good Things Come in Small Packages

It's the shortest day of the year, so for today's challenge, let's celebrate the shortest of short shorts....

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How short a story can you write?  Can you write a story that's....

• 25 words?  (This is the maximum length for Hint Fiction, and the word length for various competitions past, such as the Australian Writers' Centre 25-Word Challenge and Bath Spa University's 25-Word Novel Prize.)
• 18 words?  (Although not flash fiction, Gotham Writers' are currently running a free 18-Word Past-Year Memoir Competition.  If you write Creative Non-fiction for this prompt, we'll count it!)
• 6 words?  (The Gravity of the Thing regularly publishes six-word flashes.)

For an extra challenge, write a flash suite in three sections, one of each length above.  Let the three sections ping off each other in interesting ways, but each section should stand on its own as a complete micro.

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If you'd like to help further the aims of National Flash Fiction Day, one of the best things you can do is to support other writers.  It doesn't have to cost money; if you've read something you love recently, tell the author, write a review, or recommend it to a friend. 

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Find out more about National Flash Fiction Day at our website or get in touch if you'd like to learn more about how you can get involved.

FlashFlood Advent Calendar 2018: Day 20

Day 20:I Second (Guess) That Emotion

Tears stream down my face.  I wring my hands.  My heart pounds, races, flutters, and skips a beat.  I bite my lip and break out into a cold sweat.

What could possibly be happening?  Could it a dramatic moment in a story?  Or is it an allergic reaction to common word pairings?

If you guessed the latter, this prompt is for you....

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Step 1.

Pick a mood or emotional state that you'd like to write about.  This could be fear, anxiety, love, arousal, boredom...anything where you can imagine a character's physical response.

Step 2.

Put on a timer for five minutes or so and jot down all the common physical manifestations you can think of for that mood.  What is your character doing and feeling?  What is their body doing that is beyond their control?  What might they be doing deliberately?  What are they doing unconsciously?

Embrace cliché!  Seek out and celebrate all those common word pairings!  For fear, you might end up with something like the first paragraph, for example.  Let fingers tap, nostrils flare, skin flush and eyes widen.  Palms can be sweaty; tears can sting before they roll down cheeks. 

Step 3.

Now write a scene or story featuring that mood or emotional state without using any of the words or phrases on your list.  Spend some time describing your characters' physical responses using fresh words, ideas, descriptions and imagery.

For an extra challenge, try to gracefully weave in a few common word pairings...that would commonly be used to describe an emotion completely different from the one you're trying to portray.  Can you make a case in your story for, say, an angry character's smile softening; a character's eyes flashing with exhaustion? a character's lips pursing as a sign of tranquility?

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Save the date: NFFD has exciting things planned on 15 June 2019!  If you or a group or publication you know has a flashy event planned on or around this time, let us know and we'll promote your event on our National Flash Fiction Day Calendar, to be launched in the new year.

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Find out more about National Flash Fiction Day at our website or get in touch if you'd like to learn more about how you can get involved.

FlashFlood Advent Calendar 2018: Day 19

Day 19: Surprise!

Many holidays in December involve the exchange of wrapped gifts.

Have you ever had to act surprised when someone gives you a holiday gift but you already know what it is?  Have you ever wrapped up a present for yourself only to act surprised when it comes time to open it? 

Today's prompt gets at a wonderfully philosophical question: can a person be surprised by a present they give themselves?

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Write a flash in which you aim to surprise yourself with every sentence — perhaps even every word — as you're writing.  If you think you know how the sentence is going to end, take it a different direction.  If you think you know what word you're going to use, pick something else.  If you think you know how the story will end, find a different way to resolve it. 

At first this may feel as impossible as trying to tickle yourself, but relax, have fun, and give yourself permission to write weird and wonderful.  Free yourself to write nonsense if you like, as long as that nonsense is a continual surprise. 

For an extra challenge, take your first draft, and edit it into an equally surprising second draft.  That is, keep it linked in some way to the first draft, but aim to completely astonish yourself with your edits. 

For an extra extra challenge, keep going with surprising-yet-related edits until you have enough drafts to quilt together into a flash suite or a segmented flash.

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This is a reminder that you can give NFFD a gift without spending a penny extra.  If you haven't already done so, please consider signing up at EasyFundraising to raise a free donation for National Flash Fiction Day every time you shop online at one of the 3,500-some registered retailers.  Thank you for your help!

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Find out more about National Flash Fiction Day at our website or get in touch if you'd like to learn more about how you can get involved.