Mina Witteman – author | editor | teacher of creative writing

Posts tagged “A.L. Kennedy

220W — 220 Flash Fiction Words

Posted on November 26, 2012

It seems that the popularity of ultra short stories is on the rise. Events with famous writers of short stories, like the brilliant and funny A.L. Kennedy, and — to me — the empress of the short story Lydia Davis prove it. I like that, because I have this thing going for flash fiction. I love reading it and I love writing it. Writing with a constraint on word count forces you to zoom in on the very essence of your story. It pushes you to be terse. It allows you to rip out every empty word. No more than 220 Words. That was the prerequisite to enter the contest for the A.L. Snijders Award for Flash Fiction 2012. I had the story in a flash,…

Connect the Dots

Posted on November 24, 2012

Another prompt from The Daily Post: Open your nearest book to page 82. Take the third full sentence on the page, and work it into a post somehow. I suspected a hard one as I am reading ‘The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing’, doing research for my graduation article. We’ll see… I had been teaching creative writing for quite a while, mainly workshops and short courses, mostly to young people. One day I found myself standing before a particularly challenging class. Fifteen boys sized me up and said: “Writing? Seriously?” They sat back, folded their arms and waited, their body language screaming “no way”. The girls — an ominous thirteen of them — looked up, too. “You’re not Carrie Slee,” was all they said.…