Mina Witteman – author | editor | teacher of creative writing

Posts tagged “AFdH Uitgevers

Helpless

Posted on January 7, 2013

    Helpless. It is how I felt during 2012, with so many people I dearly loved passing away. With every death my creativity died a little, too, until I felt I had lost all connection with my projects, with my writing. It left me helpless and I had to shelve manuscripts and translation efforts. The creative juices simply stopped flowing.  Would I ever write again, I wondered? Get those juices flowing again?     Yes! I just had to remember all the good things in life, too, even if they were into deep hiding, like the Trapajon guy in his tree. I had to reach inside and pull out the good times: my son graduating from High School, a short children’s story published…

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,…