All entries for Monday 12 May 2008

Short–shorts

Writing about web page http://www.ommatidia.org/

Ommatidia is a webpage of 101-word short stories. Now this is something I can get behind. I have the attention span of a bole-wevil, but I still manage to read my webcomics every day. That probably takes me 15, 20 minutes before I have my shreddies. A daily update of a smidgen of fiction lets me feed the same habit, yet exercise my reading muscle at the same time.

The website also bounces back to the penultimate Icw session of term, looking at short stories. The point of a short story (under one reading, anyway) was to present the moment in a characters life when something changed; the story was the fulcrum between past and present, the lens through which both would forever be seen. If that was the case, I said, you could abbreviate the story into a flash fiction and be damned with the whole lengthy edifice of words.

And here we have a vast tract of flash fictions; neatly enough it provides a total counter-example to what I was saying. Because these stories, although (mostly) complete in and of themselves, suggest larger stories that could capture a greater moment. My favourite is "Jenna" (at least of the dozen or so on the front page - I'll trawl the records when I have a day), and I'm wondering how legal it would be for me to write out an expansion of the story. It is so terribly suggestive. 

: 12 May 2008 19:50 |  Tags: Flash Fiction Icw Introduction To Creative Writing Micro Fiction Nano Fiction Short Story |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem