What I Learned Writing 31(ish) Stories in 31 Days
Or, how a writing experiment made me a better writer.
For the month of May, I decided to write a flash story a day to build up my habits and skills, and to start accumulating stories I could potentially submit to flash fiction publications.
There were only three ground rules for this writing experiment:
- I had to write a flash story every day.
- Each story had to be at least 150 words long. (Yes, I know there’s shorter flash fiction out there, but I wanted to give myself a clear, reasonable bar to aim for.)
- I could write more than one story per day, but I still had to write at least one story each day.
Simple enough, right?
Here’s what actually happened.
Writing Reminders & Routines
No matter how well I planned, there were a few days when I was not able to block out the time for writing a flash story.
Okay, that’s a lie. When I didn’t write a flash story one day and had to make up the writing the next, it was for a very simple reason.
I forgot.
So, lesson number one: setting a reminder or alarm would have been a good strategy. But still, I wrote twenty-nine flash stories in May. That’s an accomplishment I can be proud of, even if I didn’t write every single day.
Often the stories didn’t take long to draft, especially if I knew where it was going when I started it.
Which leads me to my next lesson.
Plotting vs. “Pantsing” the Stories
For my novels, I’m somewhere in-between when it comes to being a writing “plotter” versus “pantser.”
Not so, apparently, with my flash fiction.
Unless I had a fully-formed idea for a story on a particular day, I was a total pantser.
And I loved it. I cannot describe how much fun it was to start a story and then have it go in a crazy twist direction I wasn’t expecting. It was a great exercise in creativity, and I recommend that even the most dedicated plotters try it out with short fiction just to see where their imagination goes.
Vivid imagination, however, does not necessarily make a story good. Which now brings me to my next lesson.
The First Draft is Probably Terrible, and That’s OK
Accept that not everything you write will be good.
Some of my flash stories from May certainly were not. A story idea that sounded fascinating in my head didn’t always translate how I’d hoped onto the page.
First drafts are notoriously bad. This does not just apply to novels. It can include first drafts of flash stories, even if they’re only a couple hundred words long.
No matter what form your writing takes, accept this fact. Be glad you got the words down on the page in the first place. You can always edit later. Even if it’s not perfect, it’s written.
“Just get it done” was a lesson that I learned participating in my first-ever NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in November 2020. And it was a lesson that this month of writing a story (almost) every day reinforced. I know that many of the stories I wrote in May will never be published.
But some of them, with a little revision, have potential. The roughest draft can hold promising material in it somewhere, even if it’s just a sentence or an idea.
Creativity is Ever-Present
And, on the subject of ideas, here is the last and most important lesson: One of my favorite takeaways from this experiment was the range of ideas, the strange and the funny and the sad, that flew from my brain to the pen to the paper. (Yes, I wrote everything by hand.)
One story idea formed just by looking out the window on a rainy morning. Another came from the cover image of a history book I was rereading as research for my novel. Still another was inspired by a song I love.
I should also mention that, one Saturday in May, I took an awesome writing workshop through The Writer’s Center on unusual forms in flash fiction. It was the perfect timing to do such a workshop, and I came away with some experimental stuff that was a lot of fun to write. And after that, the wheels were turning in directions I didn’t know they could.
This month of writing stories helped me look everywhere for ideas. My preferred form of fiction-writing is novels, but sometimes that keeps my creative muscles focused on only one thing. It’s like a runner not doing cross-training. Writing flash helped me flex those creative muscles and develop new skills, and I gained a new appreciation for the fun of short fiction.
