1,000 Word Dash

I’m all, I have a great idea! I’ve had it for a while, actually. But like any great idea, I have to mull it over, consider it, push it aside and hope it runs off to frolic with my other good ideas that never came to anything. I imagine it like the Isle of Lost Toys, but more like a ship of lost ideas, a ship with a self-sabotaged engine.

I’ve come to consider myself pretty good with one-hundred words. I like to tell people I can make one-hundred words feel like one-thousand. Sometimes I can.

But what if I did make those one-hundred, one-thousand?

Enter the idea. It’s still possible a squirrel will take me in another direction, but for now I may as well give this idea some light. It refuses to board the ship with the other ideas, so…

I have 79 one-hundred word microstories in my Friday Fictioneers category, most of these being fiction. As I continue to build that number (getting back to it again soon, now that I’ve got this Florida life somewhat together), I want to go back to the beginning and expand these stories to longer, fleshed-out pieces of fiction.

Next week, I hope, the first one will be Sturdy, composed for the 14 March 2014 Friday Fictioneers challenge. I’ve already tried to expand a couple into larger works, having a novel in mind, but I don’t want that and it’s killing my drive to try. It might make sense to start with those, seeing as they’re pretty much already there, but that would go against my need for order. Order keeps me grounded, in an almost obsessive kind of way. I don’t care how dusty something is, so long as it’s neat and orderly.

I don’t have a word count in mind. I’m not reaching for one-thousand exactly. Each story will take its course, be The End at one-thousand or seven-thousand. I doubt I go so far as seven-thousand, but who knows.  The greater goal is to have a marketable collection, that I probably won’t market. But who knows.

I will link to the original story, but those exact words may not appear exactly as they first did. I’ve already discovered that through other story expansions. Like in The Florist. In the follow-up story Frank curses, but when taking the story further, I liked him as a divinity school graduate, and the curse had to go.

What I share here won’t be a finished product, just a finished first idea. Step-two in a multi-step process. I’ll write, edit, revise, and post, then let the stories gather dust so they can show the cracks more obviously for another round of edit and revise. I hope you’ll share this journey and offer feedback. A writer needs other writers to hold a mirror to the words and show where the forwards are actually backwards.

How are you doing? Any great ideas percolating in your writing pot?

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Featured Image by Unsplash, CC0 1.0 Universal, no attribution required

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