Flash and Story a Day Report

For a given definition of "story" I have been putting out one story a day this month despite a convention, a holiday, starting a new job, getting ready to move to a new city, and some ugly virus that knocked me unconscious for 16 hours of one of those days and then hung around to gloat. Which is to say, I've done a bit more flash than I anticipated when I planned this out.

Across my writing history, I've tried a couple of accountability structures. I usually try to keep a thousand word a day average. At various points, I've had a schedule where I had a reliable hour when I wasn't doing anything in particular, which I would devote totally to writing. I've also been part of a group that had a monthly deadline for contests, as well as one where we had a weekly hour free write. And now this, wherein I am obligated to finish a story before I stop working on it.

This seems to work really well for me. I think my best motivator is still hard deadlines, followed by a reliable, scheduled time free from distractions. But as someone capable of doing two and three thousand words in a relatively short stretch, I can finish a small story in one sitting a lot of the time, and it actually feels quite good. I've been a bit more experimental- I'm experimenting with form and playing around a bit with what I'm willing to say constitutes a story, and what I can leave implied (one for example was a totally interior monologue second person future about a man who was perhaps the narrator's lover not recognizing her, while another was mostly setting up an implication of the course of events the viewpoint character was walking away from causing). It's been a lot of fun, and very useful.

I've also been reading up on and referring back to a list of articles about flash structure by Bruce Holland Rogers, whom I've mentioned before as singularly excellent on the subject. Please go check them out.