This will come as no great shock, but writing fiction is not very easy.
My original idea was to try and create 500-1000 words every couple of days. I have no shortage of ideas or storylines, but the demands of flash fiction, that the action takes place mostly in a single scene, and that scene encompasses the entire start, middle, and end of the story, make flash fiction quite hard to write. I have written many things that want to sprawl into short stories with multiple characters, scenes, and locations. Others lack the complete story and are little more than vignettes.
I have three acceptable pieces that have taken six weeks to produce. Creating a viable collection to put together and publish is looking like it will take a year unless I speed up over time.
I am spending a lot of time reading up on fiction writing, particularly flash fiction, trying to improve my writing. It may be procrastination in disguise, reading about writing rather than writing. At the moment, I still believe that I can get up to speed, or at least faster and more consistent over time.
- I need to cut out the procrastination.
- Commit to finishing what I started.
That second point is important. Not everything I write may be flash fiction, but if I finish my stories I will have at least have something that I could use, maybe a collection of short cyberpunk stories that sits alongside my cyberpunk flash fiction. The vignettes could one day find their way into a cyberpunk setting book. Who knows. The only thing that is certain is that I can do nothing with the stuff I haven’t written.
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