No Time To Waffle

So, I mentioned I started taking Keep It Brief at LitReactor last week. It’s a flash fiction class with Richard Thomas, whose Advanced Creative Writing Workshop and Short Story Mechanics I’ve also taken and loved.

Let me tell you – if you want a real intense challenge, take this class. There are lectures, readings and assignments, which add up to writing & turning in a new flash fiction story every other day.

I’ll be the first to admit I take my time writing short stories. It usually takes me a lot of brainstorming and letting ideas percolate before I’m ready to commit them to paper. But with this class, that is not an option.

We literally get an assignment and have to turn in the finished draft the next day. It’s such a challenge but also so amazing.

There’s no time to second-guess ideas or spend hours researching one little plot point or idea. I literally have to take a seed, flesh it out with characters (or even just 1), breath life into it with setting, make sure there’s enough conflict to push them up against something and bring it all to a compelling conclusion. All within a flash story (under 1000 words), all within a day.

Of course, I know these are all rough drafts that I’m turning in and will still need more work to get them ready to submit anywhere, but this has been such an effective class to get me out of my own head, to trust my gut a little more, to let my instincts guide me and just go where adventure takes me.

The coolest thing is I’ll have a good pile of stories to work on after the class is done and I’m getting a crash course in sharpening my flash fiction skills.

So, even though I’m only halfway through this class, I can highly recommend it, and honestly, I feel the same about all the classes I’ve taken with Richard. This makes me extra-stoked for the Novel In A Year class I’ll be taking with him next year. I imagine it will be even more intense and life-changing.

This is also why my Patreon has been pretty quiet of late. I haven’t had time to even look at chapters for Thicker Than Water and I’m still just under 15K shy of my goal for Camp NaNoWriMo. I have some serious catching up to do before the end of the month!