I’m noticing a tendency to write hard.
This blogging daily experiment (#Blogtober) is showing my typical content creation style: few embellishments; lots o’ statements; and little or no soft (or “flowery”) prose.
This reminds me why I stopped blogging here; I don’t really need more content creation outlets. I do content creation all day for work. I’d have to change gears and start driving down a descriptive, narrative-non-fiction road for my efforts to rev up my creative engines.
Maybe my brain can’t do both. That’s a scary concept.
But if I’m being BRUTALLY honest with myself, though, it isn’t the switching back and forth between the two types of writing, journalistic and literary, it’s the switching between two different professional hats. Am I a content creator or a fiction writer? So far, I’ve been paid for only one of those. Granted, I haven’t attempted to get paid for the other, but the strong bias for economic gain is eager to squish out the other identity altogether.
Going from “content writer who also writes fiction” to the opposite, “fiction writer who also writes content” is necessary but so far has proven difficult. Even now I can’t switch my brain to give you a deeper description than that.
Today it occurred to me I should have signed up for some sort of month-long-fiction activity, instead of a blogging activity. I searched the web for “Flashtober.” Is there a flash fiction October, with prompts like #inktober?
Lo and behold, I found this. It’s a post from 2018 that mentions “Flashtober,” a month-long fiction exercise through which writers share their work. (If you don’t know what “Flash fiction” is, let me sum up: Usually spurred by a prompt of some sort and accompanied by a word minimum and/or limit –and occasionally a time limit too,– writers are tasked with coming up with a bit of prose on the spot. It’s meant to flex one’s creative muscles and get the muse juices flowing.
I found some other posts mentioning Flashtober going back to 2017, but the real activity is over on Twitter, where the 2018 guy from above has started a thing! I wonder if I start now I could backdate the prompts. Of course, I don’t have to listen to some random writer dude on the internet for prompts or to write flash fiction, but participating in a community is much more fun than doing it alone. If you search on #flashtober, you don’t get a lot of different users in the results. The community is small. But I’m going to check it out. It could be something the writing community on Twitter just hasn’t discovered yet. They may all be gearing up for NANOWRIMO, so maybe the Flash Fiction month should be moved to say… February, but it’s a start.
Pic by Colin and Sarah Northway on Flickr