Guest Blogger Grant Faulkner: Since it’s National Novel Writing Month, I wanted to share my thoughts on the creative process that is at its core: writing with abandon. This is a reprint of an essay that originally appeared in Poets & Writers. A few years ago I grappled with a simple question I had never before bothered to ask myself: Did I decide on my writing process, or did it decide on me? Despite an adult lifetime of reading innumerable author interviews, biographies of artists, and essays on creativity, I realized I’d basically approached writing the same way for years. And I didn’t remember ever consciously choosing my process, let alone experimenting with it in any meaningful way. My approach formed itself around what I’ll call “ponderous preciousness.” I’d conceive of an idea for a story and then burrow into it deliberately. I’d write methodically, ploddingly, letting thoughts percolate, then marinate—refining…
Tag: 100 word story
100 Word Story
Do you like to write short pieces? If yes, then Grant Faulkner’s 100 word story is for you! From the 100 word story website: “One hundred seems perfect. It’s the basis of percentages, the perfect test score, the boiling point of water (Celsius), purity. Pythagoreans considered 100 as divine because it is the square (10 x 10) of the divine decad (10). Even a Scrabble set has 100 tiles. And yet 100 is a fragment. It’s an arbitrary marker, like the ‘First 100 Days’ of a president’s term—merely a promise of what’s to come, or a whiff of what has passed.” Submit: 100 words … no more or no less. Tell a story, write a prose poem, pen a slice of your memoir, or try your hand at an essay.
Baby shoes for sale. Never worn.
“Baby shoes for sale. Never worn.” Hemingway wrote this six-word tale that has become the ultimate short, short-story. The reader can fill in the blanks. I wonder how many variations of a theme these few words have inspired. Grant Faulkner honed his skills to write short, 100-word essays and writes in the August 2015 issue of The Writer magazine: “A flash writer has to paint characters in deft brushstrokes, with the keenest of images in such limited space. Shorts require immediacy; they’re a flicker of light in the darkness, a prick, a thunderclap . . . Paring down my writing and focusing on what goes unsaid and unexplained help me build suspense.” Faulkner says, about Hemingway’s six-word story, “The story moves by implication– the empty space around those few words invite the reader to fill them, transforming the reader into a co-author.” If this type of writing appeals to you,…