Hello readers!
I'm excited to share with you a flash fiction story I wrote during some creative burn out. I find these stories, while not the best in quality, to be a learning experience. Not only to myself, but to show other writers that we all get burn out and struggle to write. I still found enough energy to write something, but it's not the best. That's why after the story, I want to talk about what I think went wrong.
Here's the prompt for this story: Character: A person in their early 90s who is healthy.
Situation: Everything is upside down.
Action: Your character falls down.
I start walking up the stairs to the house, and find it hard to stabilize myself. It’s only two steps, although they’re steep. I walk them everyday, seeing as I’m very healthy for my old age, but today they’ve become a challenge,
I place my right foot on the top stair, and start to move my left. I get my left foot up, but the toe of my shoe doesn’t make it. I stumble onto my left foot and fall flat on my face. It hurts pretty bad, but I manage to get up again. It takes a while for me to stand up, but once I do, I soon realize everything around me is upside down! I turn my head to try and straighten things up, but it doesn’t seem to work. I’m walking on the sky, and I reach down to touch the grass, brushing my fingers against it. When I do, it turns pink.
The color spreads from the grass to the plants, making the trees into cotton candy and the flowers into lollipops. I look to see my house has become gingerbread and the stairs are sugar wafers. I must I’ve hit my head quite hard to hallucinate like this. I walk over to my apple tree and bend down to grab what looks to be a candied apple. I bite into it, enjoying the sweet taste.
I soon notice a rabbit in the bushes, seemingly watching me. I step closer to it, and it hops forward. So I go closer, following it through the bushes and into an even stranger place. A whole field of candy flowers, and children frolicking through the grass. They look to be my own, although they’re not young anymore. I start to approach them, but they start to fade away. I reach for them, but I instead only grab something soft and warm.
“Mom, are you ok?”
I see my daughter, concerned about filling her face.
“I just fell,” I say, “Isn’t that what old people do?”
She laughs and shakes her head, smiling.
“I’m glad you’re ok,” she helps pull me up.
“Me too,” I say, smiling as I stand up straight.
The world is right side up again, and all is well.
Right! Let's look at what I think went wrong.
I was exhausted when writing this. Unfortunately, I had taken my night medication with my morning medication on accident. So while writing this, I was very sleepy. That will explain the rest of my problems with the story.
It's rushed. Even for 400 words, (it's actually 374) I moved too fast. I didn't flesh out the concept of the main character falling into a fantasy land.
I didn't use my words well. In short, I could've condensed how much time was spent on unnecessary description by picking my words more carefully. I didn't do this. Nor did I have energy to edit, which would've helped.
The main character has no voice. As someone who writes in 1st person, it's important that the point of view character has a strong voice. This could've been fixed with editing, but I didn't do this either.
I think critiquing my own works is important, and is something I do often. I wanted to share this thought process with you as well, so you can improve your own writing!
Have a great week,
-Rosetta 💖
Image by Trevin Rudy
Comments