The Introduction

I, like most writers, suffer from writer's block. It is an affliction of the mind that I have not been able to cure through time, exercises, and other trials before. I have tried many things to get me to write more consistently, better, and with things that interest me, and yet the problem comes back to visit often. It's probably not even curable. But as the next step in my battle against writer's block, I am taking on a new exercise of a more public nature.

I am going to write one flash fiction story every Tuesday and Friday. Why Tuesday and Friday? Mostly because I'm starting this on a Friday, and three days a week seems a little much at the start.

Flash fiction is a genre of story writing that I am quite taken with. I discovered it several years ago, when I had a radio show called "To Tell A Story" on my campus radio station. In that show, I read short stories and played accompanying classical music. While researching stories, I stumbled upon an addicting book at the library entitled Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories, edited by James Thomas, Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka. I read several of the stories in a show, and the idea of such an incredibly short story really stuck with me.

Depending on where you go, the rules change about what flash fiction is, what it's called, and the criteria involved. The type of super short story that I'm going to be doing is one I've seen around several different places: writing a short story in 55 words or less. This particular form was partly developed by a contest held by New Times, a newspaper in California, in 1987.

Here are the rules as I interpret them. Many of this I got from the New Times website:

• The stories will be told in 55 words or less
• The word limit doesn't include the title, although the title can't be more than 7 words long
• Each story follows the conventional story rules of having a beginning, middle/conflict, and end
• What counts as a single word: a number, anything in the dictionary, a commonly use acronym (ex: NASA), or a contraction
• Punctuation doesn't count as a word. Which is awesome, because I love commas
• Hyphenated words count separately, unless they can't stand as two different words if the hyphen was removed. For example, four-year-old still counts as three words, but re-entry and e-mail count as one.

And that's pretty much it. If there's anything I left ambiguous, please point it out as I go and I can add it to the rules.

Telling a complete story in such a short amount of space is a challenge. That's why I like it. While I can't promise that the resulting stories I will write will be any good, I am ready to rise up to the challenge of writing them. And hopefully you, my readers, whoever you are and whether or not you exist, will hold me to this challenge I am taking on.

So here goes.