The hardest part of writing a Ficlet isn’t the writing. The challenge lies in the editing. 1024 characters doesn’t give one much room for rambling, redundancy and so on. I love so many words, often for the way they sound one after another as much as for their meanings. Writing in a limited space goes against my loquacious nature. But Seth threw down the gauntlet ever so politely some time ago. And Rusty published his second ever, just this morning.
So today, I decided to step up to the plate and swing over lunch. I called it “Yesterday Girl.”
As it sits, I’m not sure entirely that the idea in my head made it entirely into the story. But it will do. Contributing audio influences included, but were not limited to: Burial’s Untrue (the track “In McDonalds,” especially), The Roots’ “Rising Up,” John Coltrane’s “Too Young To Go Steady” and James Taylor’s “Another Grey Morning.” The story’s title is also the name of a Smithereens tune, but one really has nothing to do with the other.
And now that I’ve completed one, another should be a walk in the park. Shouldn’t it?
3 responses to “A Ficlet Of My Imagination”
Reading Seth’s blog post, I realized I’m supposed to be publishing these on Fridays if it’s a group activity. Oops. Will do that next time.
It’s a lot of fun. It reminds me of a fiction class I took in college where the prof made us write 1-pagers and read them out loud for everyone else to interpret. Objectively, they typically weren’t very good, but it was a lot of fun listening to people gradually tighten up their writing over the course of the semester.
Thanks for accepting the challenge and diving right in.
I think you’ve gotten to the heart of the challenge of Ficlets: word-management and editing. It might even be punctuation and pagination, too.
I really enjoyed the story. I dig the time travel/Memento vibe that you captured.
Can’t wait to read more.
Rusty —
Yeah, that dawned on me as well. Next time. Next time, we’ll fall in on Friday.
Seth —
Pagination? At 1,024 characters, we’re talking paragraph-ination at most! So many innocent adjectives and adverbs hit the cutting room floor for this one …