Prose Project

In addition to the Poetry Project, everyone in our workshop will produce one of the following:

1) 2 short stories;

2) 1 short story and 3 flash fiction pieces;

3) 1 "creative non-fiction" and 3 flash fiction pieces.

This work will appear in our online magazine, and a short selection will be read at the Gov School closing ceremony. The work should go through a process of revision and workshopping before the final version is handed in. A typical short story or creative non-fiction piece for our purposes should run from about four to six pages, typed and double-spaced. (This is negotiable.)

Pay special attention to the following:

• Character development. Your characters should be like real human beings: distinct, original, complex, believable, and fully drawn. Watch out for generic, "flat" characters that can't be distinguished from each other.

• Plot development. Think about our discussion of plot and important elements in most plots: the narrative question(s), exposition, complicating actions, pacing, structure, crisis or climax. Consider also various plot devices which you can try: flashbacks, framing, multiple intersecting plots, montage, and action in medias res.

• Weak plot pacing. Be careful that you don't start out slowly then speed too fast to an ending.

• Trick endings. Watch out for clever, "twist" or surprise endings. These are overdone and too easy. No suicide endings!

• Excessive plot heaviness. Let interesting characters drive your story; not just a flashy plot.
  
  
• Play! Draw on events from your own life, experiment with point of view, practice different prose styles, be funny, weird.
  

Flash Fiction

Flash Fiction—sometimes called Micro, Brief, or Sudden Fiction—is a very short-short story, each piece only about 250-400 words. Though derided by some as a sign of dying literacy or the product of an overstimulated, media-stunned, zero-attention-span culture, Flash Fiction can actually be quite difficult, varied, and imaginative. As Mark Strand says, "It can do in a page what a novel does in two hundred. It covers years in less time, time in almost no time. It wants to deliver us to where we were before we began." And Joyce Carol Oates: "We who love prose fiction love these miniature tales both to read and to write because they are so finite, so highly compressed and highly charged." And John L'Heureux: "The short-short story is an exercise in virtuosity that tightens the circle of mystery surrounding what we know."

Because of obvious time contraints at Governor's School, and because there isn't time to produce fiction of any serious length, Flash Fiction is a very manageable genre.

For a collection of sample flash stories, CLICK HERE.

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