The Chopping Block : The Power of Brevity

At the end of April, I was a guest speaker in a friend’s college class. I talked about flash fiction and how cutting a story to its bones can sometimes make a story stronger and more universal. We did a writing exercise, cutting stories in half and then in half again, down to their very essentials, and it was amazing how often we found these very brief distillations of story were better, sharper, and more moving than their longer versions.

As a challenge, I asked students to enter the 53-Word Story contest. The prompt was to write a 53-word story set in a carnival. I promised that I would enter the contest, too.

And I did. My entry was a piece I’d been working on for a while. There were several versions, all of them going on for several pages, but not quite working out the way I wanted them to.

I took them, stripped them, boiled them down. This story was the result.

HereComesTheChopper
Stuck with a story? Be brave. Be ruthless.

Chop, chop, chop!

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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