Sunday 16 July 2017

A story project

And now for something completely different ...

This is the first of hopefully a number of blogposts inspired initially by a book I picked up called 365. It's a collection of stories, one written every day for a year, each exactly 365 words long. It occurred to me to try and do something similar but I know myself well enough to know there is no way on this earth I would keep that up. So then I wondered about trying to write 100 100word "stories" (not necessarily in 100 days ... there's no point setting myself up for that kind of failure before I even begin!) 

I've written quite a bit of poetry (although not very much recently) but while I've long fancied the idea of trying my hand at story writing it has never actually happened. I looked up the idea of 'national novel writing month' but I know my life is WAY too busy to contemplate writing a novel (ever, let alone in a month!) but 100 words, that should be doable, no? 

It was an idea that had been floating around my head with no concrete outcome for a little while until I led one of the drop-in classes at St Chad's Sanctuary and we talked about doors: we described doors and then told stories about what might happen when you stepped through them. That was the second dose of inspiration I needed to put pen to paper (cursor to screen) and I now have a collection of ten 100 word "stories" loosely about doorways. 

I'm hoping / assuming that at some point another few themes will suggest themselves to me, and that eventually I'll create my collection of 100... don't hold your breath. I'm open to suggestions but not making any promises!

It turns out 100 words is really not very many (anyone who knows me will know I rarely say something in 15 words if I can use 50!) I'm not sure whether what I've written constitutes 'stories', hence the inverted commas. Then again, I'm not sure a story is something particularly easy to define: but perhaps that's a discussion for another day. 

Anyway, for what they are worth, I'll publish them here to be read or ignored at will.

Stories to follow ...

No comments:

Post a Comment