It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here, so I though that I might use this arena as a place to discuss this year’s ‘thing-a-day’ project. Today is the sixth of the way there mark; sixty-one days of writing between 100 and 1024 characters every single day. Already I am finding it to be both more and less challenging than the daily portrait project, but despite that I am loveing every moment of it. Not only is there the creation / creative aspect of it, but there is the ability to use fiction to bare my soul a little; sometimes very obviously, and sometimes in much more subtle ways, and then there is the discourse that is wonderful and more often than not prompted by stories that I least expect!
I have been working to a pattern over the last sixty-one days, and although I am going to work out the week in this vein, I am then going to free myself to be more flexible and more creative with what I do. Up until now the Saturday of each week (day one of each week if you will) has been a first person narration that sounds believeably my voice, and then the other six days have all been third person episodes, each beginning with a name. As I have revealed already to people who have asked, this was entirely calculated. Although I am still very much learning my craft here, I am comfortable with the first person narration that my Saturday pieces have used. It is relatively easy for me to imagine a scenario that has either happened or might happen in my life and drop into the character of a narrator who is seventy percent ‘me’ and and just go from there. In fact the novel I have been working on for far too long now is written very much in that vein, and so when embarking on this new project I wanted to ‘keep my hand in’ with that ‘voice’, but not simply fall back on it as a way to easily hit my daily quota. Instead I wanted to force myself to do something that I am not comfortable with, and that was and still is to write in the third person about other characters, a fairly traditional floating, omniscient voice that knows the hearts and minds of the people that populate the stories that it tells. I have really enjoyed writing this way, far more than I expected to, and although I think that I am still better at first person narration I have found a pleasure in writing in this other way that I never expected to be able to harness.
The problem is that I can sense that this is going to become dull if I drag it out for too long; dull for me and perhaps more importantly dull for my readers. So I have decided to remove the restrictions that I had placed on my daily writing as of this coming Sunday, and introduce two new ideas to the project and return to another old one, as a way of keeping things fresh.
First of all I would like to ask you, my readers, to challenge me each week by suggesting:
- A location
- An object
- An activity
in time for me to write a Ficlet on each Thursday that will incorporate all three. I will put the call out on Monday at some point, and will then put up a poll on Wednesday so that you can choose the ‘package’ that will be the bones of Thursday’s Ficlet.
Secondly, I am going to write Monday’s Ficlet by choosing something to write about from either the Wikipedia ‘on this day in history’ page, or the daily page on the same site.
Thirdly I am going to go back to writing a story based on, or inspired by a photograph from Flickr that is on there under the same license as Ficlets are published under. If you find a cool picture on Flickr that you think I would like, or that you’d like to see what I will do with it, then please feel free to email me a link (address is on my LJ profile page, or you can use the email link on this blog, on the About Page), or leave me a comment on one of my blogs, or send me a Twitter Tweet or an SMS or whatever, and I will start a list of photos that I am going to work through.
So, thanks to everyone who has commented on LJ, Ficlets, or to my face for your feedback and support, and having got to milestone number one I am feeling more confident that I can see this project through as well.