It’s September! Which means absolutely nothing to me, when it comes to colored leaves, Pumpkin Spice lattes, and crisp temperatures, since I now live in the desert! But I’m excited to learn all the things that Arizona has to offer for the fall months!
Photo cred Unsplash by Daniel Cheung
September also means my month of writing Flash Fiction has come to an end. For the month of August, I decided to post a Flash Fiction story every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, to challenge myself in writing more FF. I’m happy to say I (mostly) succeeded and it’s done! But no worries. I’m not going to stop writing FF all together! The plan is to stick with FF Fridays and maybe sneak in an extra story or two here and there.
I will admit, this challenge was harder than I thought it would be. “What a fun challenge! It will be easy to write 3 stories a week!” I naively thought to myself a full month ago. Oh how little I knew back then. Not that this past month was torture to get through – it was quite fun rising to the challenge of coming up with a new story practically every other day. But it definitely wasn’t easy!
Here are my stats in My Month of Flash Fiction:
12 stories – Total written
2 days – Total days missed (one Wednesday and one Friday).
500 words – The ‘sweet-spot’ for my word count. I wrote the most stories – 5 total – within this word count. Others were: 3 stories at 100 words, 2 stories at 300 words and 2 stories at 1000 words
5 categories – 2 Romance, 3 Drama, 2 Fantasy, 4 Thriller (although most of these were fantasy too), 1 with All the Feels. And might I venture to say I had a hard time deciding between the word ‘thriller’ and ‘horror’? Why am I drawn to the scary stuff, guys?? I had a solid Sci-Fi story planned and it never left my head. Maybe this month!
4 inspirations – Total number of stories that came from real life inspiration or an idea taken from a TV/movie. Can you guess which ones? I’d love to hear which ones you think came from my children!!
What did I learn through this process, you ask? Well, the biggest thing that stood out is that writing a story in 100 words or less is the most difficult thing for me! For most of these, I sat down with the intention of 100 words, but just couldn’t figure out how to tell it without all that fun description that I love so much! So this is one area I need to continue to practice in – die to my stupid love of description and get that story across in as few words as possible.
What about you? Did you participate in any challenges for the month of August? I’d love to hear what you did down below in the comments! Feel free to leave a blurb and link to your own site!
And for the month of September, I’ll be participating in the #WIPjoy challenge, as presented by fellow writer Bethany A. Jennings. Feel free to participate right along with us – and tweet your progress as you go! You can find me @lauralzimm.
Happy writing, friends!
