First Assignment

According to Sam Leith, the reason so many people are drawn to writing very short creative writing texts (I will refer to this as flash fiction from now on for simplicity's sake) is that it is a challenge. Creative writing is hard in itself, and when you only have so many words (in the example of the so-called “mini-sagas”, fifty words to be exact) at your disposal, it is quite obvious that writing good flash fiction is not an easy task.

This kind of fiction is about getting the biggest emotional or intellectual impact by using very few words. Whether it is an emotional impact such as happiness – often in the form of laughter, because let’s face it; some of them are made purely for cheap laughs – or an intellectual impact which makes you stop and think for a few seconds about the moral of the story, such as “Coming Home”, it is about bringing a message in a brief way.

Part of the appeal also lies in the fact that you can say something by not saying it. Reading between the lines is a large part of flash fiction’s impact. It also allows some wiggle-room for the imagination.

Sam Leith seems accepting of flash fiction as a serious art form due to its simplistic complexity – the fact that the author only provides the framework of the story; it is the reader that makes up the main content around the frame that has been given. The frame is still the base, though, and without solid framework, you will not get a decent story.

A properly done mini-saga usually carries a lot more meaning than the fifty words alone do alone. In my opinion, a proper mini-saga would have to make me think and reflect over what it said – to be intellectually stimulating – and provide some sort of moral. “Coming Home” is an excellent example of this. I do not have a copy of it personally, so I might even have gotten the name wrong, but as I recall, “Coming Home” is about a student coming home to his family from university, only to find out that in order to support him with his education, they have sold off their cattle and lived in poverty. It makes one think about what others actually go through to support you.

For a “winning entry”, I would say that it would need to have a moral, leave a lot to the imagination and make one reflect over what was actually said.

First Post: Strengths, Weaknesses and Goals

As a writer, when not writing for assignments and such, I write fictional prose – usually science fiction. World building is an essential part of science fiction, even though it is often based on the real world, and requires a sense of imagination.

I would personally say that that is one of my strengths in writing; a sense of imagination. Of course, since this is a general writing skills course, you would not want me to rant on about fictional prose, so I will cut that short.

Another one of my strengths is my vocabulary. Although it might be less impressive here in the UK than it was back in Norway, I would still argue that I can dish up some quite magnificent words every now and again to make what I mean clear.

My biggest weakness would probably be that I take forever to start writing. Once I have started, I can keep writing at an alright pace, but finding somewhere to start is very challenging.

My punctuation can also be a little cluttered, and I place commas and semicolons everywhere.

In addition, I tend to use too many words, and end up with sentences longer than optimal, resulting in me having to crop my text if is an assignment with a word limit.

My goals for this course is to improve my general writing skills in order to be both more concise and precise, and hopefully to be able to start writing quicker!