The piece of art pictured below by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller was commissioned by Modern Art Oxford and the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh. 5,000 books glued together as bricks to make a house you can step inside. The smell inside is wonderful, of starch and paper. But I wanted to take it apart and READ.
I recently wrote four pieces of short fiction, to a deadline. I’d pledged to write three pieces within three hours. All four stories were written to prompts provided by a writer’s forum. The prompts were excellent, thought-provoking and meaty. The forum was pledged to write a total of 100 stories within two days and it achieved that target. Each story was posted anonymously and then commented on by the other writers. For each story you posted you had to comment on at least three stories by others. Great discipline, because reading is a vital part of writing and critting hones skills like nothing else.
The process worked very well, smooth and seamless. It was the first time I’d taken part in a challenge at this particular forum, which includes some stellar writers, and I’ll admit I was nervous. But once I’d pledged to take part, I relaxed that part of my brain where I keep a tight lid on the voices that are always bubbling under waiting for me to pay attention to the stories they want to tell. I let three voices rise to the surface and let these three check the prompt lists until they found something that suited. Then I wrote. The fourth voice came direct from the prompt itself which was of course how I was meant to approach the whole exercise.
It was interesting to see how other writers critiqued the stories, not just mine but everyone’s. These are serious writers, many of them award-winning. They had serious comments to make about the stories posted at the forum. What interested me most was a tendency to read the stories not as tales being told to them but as tales they would have told differently. They read, in other words, as writers rather than readers. I went back and checked my own critiques. I did the same. We were nearly all of us reading in this way, seeing a story we would like to tell and nudging the author in that direction. This is not to say that the comments weren’t useful and constructive. They absolutely were. But I made a mental note to put my writer’s hat aside and read as a reader, keeping my own ego out of it. (I mean ego in the true sense rather than as vanity, although god knows I suffered some serious pen-envy reading some of those stories!)
All in all, a great day’s work. I thoroughly enjoyed the writing, the reading and the taking part. I highly recommend the exercise, to writers everyone, especially those seeking to hone flash fiction skills.
Sarah Hilary is a frequent contributor to Every Day Fiction (Lolita’s Lynch Mob is an all-time favorite) and on other flash sites around the web. Check out her blog, Crawl Space, where she lists all her online writing and then check out her other brilliant FLASHES of fiction. Pick Ugly, was one of the Commended entries to the Leaf Books Nano Fiction Contest 2009, and will be published in their anthology.
