Welcome to Flash Week! I host these once a month, starting the third Monday and going through the following Sunday. 

We start with a blank sheet of paper.

For seven days, we pledge 10 minutes a day to Flash Week.

We end with a complete flash fiction story of ~900-1200 words.

After the week is over, what’s next is up to you — revise your complete flash & submit it around, blow it out into a longer short story or novel (!), drag it over to the trash folder and shrug. Whatever you do, you will have written a whole story start to finish, and that’s a pretty decent use of 70 minutes.

As usual (as always) you only need to write for 10 minutes a day. 

BUT. For this week only, these are not standalone exercises. You will want to save what you do on Day 1 as input to Day 2 etc through Day 7. We’ll spend days 1-3 on pre-work and 4-7 on writing the prose. And for the no-homework version you MUST stick to the outline you make on Day 3, or I can’t guarantee you’ll finish.

This month we’ll be using Dan Harmon’s story circles framework to build our outlines on Day 3. We’ll review it in more detail later in the week, but I’ll give you a little preview now in case it sparks an idea or four. The story circle is a classic quest: a protagonist descends into the unknown to satisfy a need/want and returns, changed.

Day 1 is today. Here’s today’s exercise:

Brainstorm a NUMBERED list of DIFFERENT story seeds, each no more than a sentence long. A story seed can be a phrase, an image, a trope crossover, a weird animal fact, something from a prior exercise that you want to revisit … anything that strikes you. If an idea really sparkles for you, mark it with an asterisk (*) … but keep going with your list.

If you want to start thinking ahead, you might pay special attention to generating and recording ideas related to protagonists, motivations, macguffins, obstacles, or settings.

Got it? Great! Save the list. Let your brain noodle overnight and I’ll see you tomorrow for Day 2, when we’ll develop your favorite idea into a cloud of possibilities. 

p.s. If you have more than one favorite that’s a great “problem” to have — I’m certainly not gonna stop you from getting more than one story out of this!! But again, for the no-homework version, commit to one for now and we will use the next six days to take it all the way to The End.