The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

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Morley, David - The Cambridge introduction to creative writing (2011) - libgen.li
Harry G. Broadman - Africa\'s Silk Road China and India\'s New Economic Frontier (2007, World Bank Publications) - libgen.li

Writing Game
F
L ASH FICTION TOSH OR TS TORY Write a story inexactly words, no more, no less, taking no more than minutes. When revising, cut the story by precisely one tenth of its length, leaving a final version. Take all the words/sentences from the cut tenth, and begin rearranging them so that they take on a rough internal logic. Then take the key character from your flash fiction and make them the protagonist of a short story of 3,000 words. The cut tenth must find their way into your short story, either as description or as monologue/dialogue. It must in noway shape the narrative thread of your short story.
A
I M Writing to these restrictions precipitates a controlled free fall. Reusing a character is useful training for developing a longer narrative thread, say in a novella. Recycling deleted work is an exercise in developing verbal cunning.
Subverting the form
Your decision will also shape the reader’s expectations even before they absorb the first sentence. You might wish to play with such expectations. You will remember from our discussion of form in Chapter
Three that it provides a useful tool insofar as you can break with it, subvert it and even shatter it. One way to think about this is to allow the structure of apiece to ambush the story’

The practice of fiction
163
(in Ian McEwan’s phrase) so that the structure tells a different story from the one the piece is telling.
Anti-narrative techniques in fiction disrupt and subvert the forward momentum of a story, and even the sense of time and place. Some short stories appear to be assembled cunningly from several apparent flash fictions, which are cutup and collaged into a longer narrative. This produces jump-cuts in time, and rapid switches of scene like viewing the world from a fairground waltzer. Fora powerful example, read, then write an imitation of, Robert Coover’s ‘The
Babysitter’, in Ford (
1992
: 350).

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