Connie's Corner

Everyone needs time....

My micro fiction class went very well yesterday. It seems as though it takes three or four meetings for everyone to get at ease with each other. We hit that mark yesterday evening and had a very talkative and enriching discussion. We even shared emails and are going to send next week's story assignment to each other ahead of time for critiques.

We had our own lottery arising from The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, which you might enjoy. The prizes for our lottery were three free books on different subjects (memoir, prose, poetry) compliments of our instructor. Unfortunately, I did not win anything, but we shall have another next week she says .

Everyone had fun with their assignment, writing prose about a holiday. One of the things Kaye keeps saying is to forget those adverbs. Short stories and prose have no room for them and they add nothing to the message. Short fiction is all about implication and prose is all about image. At times it can be difficult to tell one from the other with the exception that prose need not tell a story, only create a image.

For next week, we are to rewrite our original story (from our first assignment) and up the words to 500, no back-story, no adverbs, introduce some dialogue, with desire thwarted, some action and consequences, limit adjectives, max of three characters, in first person point of view.

I almost did not go to my class since it rained all day with a terrible thunderstorm around 3 in the afternoon, but at 5 the sky started turning blue, the sun came out and created a beautiful rainbow in the east. It was a sign .

until next time...c