Day 10 writers! A third of the way (more or less). Whether you’ve written one story, or 10, are you having fun? Are you writing more (and finishing more) than you otherwise would have? Then the challenge is a success. I’m running at a slight deficit myself, but have a couple of plane rides ahead of me I plan on using to get all caught up.
Today’s prompt is about creating some flash fiction. In the age of the Internet and blogs, this form has really come into its own. There are flash fiction contests galore and lots of publication calls for flash fiction pieces. We’re going to do a whole month of flash fiction in February (because, alliteration). There are lots of definitions out there, but the only real limitation is length. Flash should be short. Not as short as a 100-word drabble, but shorter than a traditional short story. About 1000 words. The reader literally just gets a flash, one scene. Something is happening and the curtain is ripped back, we get a tantalizing glimpse, can see where the whole thing is going, and then, show’s over. Except it’s not. The flash was provocative, compelling, and so the story continues in the reader’s mind. I read somewhere that all stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But all of those pieces do not necessarily have to be on the page.
Check out some examples here.
Day 10 Prompt: “Write a story in under 1000 words focusing on creating one brilliant image in your reader’s mind … Make sure your story is about one thing, one moment. Aim to change your reader’s mind about something, whether it’s a person, an experience or a condition of life.”
[updated]
Here’s my flash piece. I thought I would have trouble keeping it under 1000 words, but once I got it in my head that it would not be a tidy narrative but just a glimpse at a world in which a whole lot more is going on, I wound up coming in way under 1000 words.
In the Belly of the Whale
The boy had a dream, once, that he was in the belly of a whale. He could feel it surging forward, plunging and rising in clouds of bubbles that reached him as a faraway drumming. And when he could no longer feel or hear it in that way, he still knew, from a ticking in his inner ear, or from the sudden uneasy shifting of his stomach, that the thing moved. Eventually, whether the creature stopped or whether the boy became acclimated to its watery gymnastics, there was nothing but the plinking echo of drops in a watery cave, the muffled thump and hum of the creature’s organs.
The boy felt no hunger, could not even summon the memory of hunger. And, though he did not sleep, he was lulled into a slumberous state. From time to time he made small movements, in his extremities, to reassure himself that he was still there.
It was hot. An animal that size is, first and foremost, a furnace, churning fuel into energy at an unfathomable rate. From time to time the boy felt the whale opening itself, as if on hinges, letting great expanses of ocean flow through it. He pictured hordes of sightless little barely-there organisms trapped in the riffling furrows of the great combs that lined the whales jaws—surfaces like the undersides of giant toadstools, hideous in their intricacy.
The boy had often pictured himself cowering under such toadstools, their caps glossy red or yellow with white dots, shades of blood and bile that hissed “poison!” in the mush-muted palette of a primeval forest. Mushrooms of such size were the preferred hiding places of children in the brutal nursery rhymes his German grandmother told him, the rushing river of her words slamming itself into hard consonants.
The boy was cowering under one now. Just like that. The whale was gone and the boy was alone in the angry darkness, full of the hiss and snarl of prowling things, the patter and screech of things, like him, imperfectly hidden. Cool air swished past him, like a puff from the mouth of a cave. Something was scissoring toward the boy, in the dark. Something that pulsed. Ominous, baleful, portending doom. It never arrived. It was always coming.
* * *
The man on the couch looks up at the doctor, asks wearily, “Does that answer your question?” The clock ticks on the wall.
The doctor sets down his pen and pad of paper. In an hour, he has written almost nothing down. “It does. Yes, it can be like that, sometimes. Like the belly of a whale.” The doctor seems to be thinking of something. “The mushrooms. All of it.” The clock ticks.
After a moment, “I’m going to prescribe you something, Dennis.”
Silence.
“Dennis, will you let me help you?” The doctor rises from his chair, puts his hand on the man’s shoulder.
But the man is gone. A little boy sits on the couch, his back hunched in a silent sob. His pupils are huge, as if he’s just stepped out of the darkness and into the light.
“Yes. Thank you, yes.”
[Day 11: 529 words]
