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.