April, Camp Nano, and Flash Fiction

It’s April! I am so happy to wake up to birdsong and get some Vitamin D. It has been a rough couple of months.

With April comes Camp Nanowrimo and I decided at the last minute to participate this year. After much deliberation, I chose to work on  flash fiction, with the goal of writing a new piece of a maximum of 1,500 words each day of the month. My hope is to have at least several more pieces that I can edit and improve for a flash fiction collection I’d like to publish in the near future.

Flash fiction isn’t easy, which I knew. Instead of creating a story world and characters that you spend a lot of time with, get familiar with, and spend chapters and chapters illuminating for the reader, you are giving just a glimpse in flash fiction. You still have to have a solid grasp on that character and that world and on the emotions of whatever situation you’re showing, but you have to get it across in snapshots. It takes an economy of words that I am striving for in my work.

It’s very hard to do well and I’m already behind. It might have been easier to commit this time to editing the novel I wrote last November or even to working on one of my as-yet-unwritten ideas. (One of which is completely outlined and just waiting.) But, I thought doing the flash pieces might jumpstart my creative juices a bit.

I have a few scenes in my head that feature characters from other stories that I’ve written or have started plotting. Bits and pieces that won’t really fit into a novel or short, but are great character development for my own thought process. I’m hoping to get a few of those down this month.

I feel like the fiction manufacturing plant in my brain has been shut down for a bit. Equipment malfunction or perhaps protestors at the gates, who knows? Camp Nano could be my solution. I’ll let you know in May!