Flash Fiction Workshop – Write Along!

Are you feeling it yet?

Are you feeling it yet?

As the Flash Fiction Workshop at Swansea Public Library moves into its second week, here are some prompts and readings to keep you motivated. If you can’t attend the workshop in person, you can follow along at home.

First, commit to spending three hours a week writing. If you can do more, good for you! But if you’re like most of us–juggling jobs, families, and the nagging need to do some laundry–three hours a week may be all you can commit to. That’s okay. Three hours can take you through three drafts of a flash story, or the creation of three new stories.

Recap of our first week’s reading: we read “The Story of an Hour,” an early (1894) example of flash fiction from Kate Chopin. It’s available in many anthologies and online here. Take-home reading was “The Flowers” by Alice Walker, from Sudden Fiction (Continued), an anthology worth seeking out. You can also read the story here.

Our in-class writing exercise was to choose a visual prompt from a collection of vintage postcards and write a story from a single character’s point of view, set in a specific place and time period. If you’d like to try this (or try it again) at home, here’s a collection of visual prompts that may inspire you.

And for homework, the challenge was to write a 10-sentence story, using a variety of sentence lengths and structures, including one sentence fragment with only a few words, one short sentence with five words, and one long, complex sentence. There is no limit on theme or format, other than the 10-sentence limit.

5WordsI hope to see both continuing and new students at our next workshop!

About Kathryn

Kathryn Kulpa is a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash fiction collection Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus). She is also the author of a short story collection, Pleasant Drugs (Mid-List Press) and a microfiction chapbook, Who's the Skirt? (Origami Poems Project). As a two-legged being, she is in the minority in her household.

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