Twiction, flash, drabble, dribble, and hint fiction
Novels are tiring, partly because you have so much freedom – whole worlds to invent and so on. So every so often I take a holiday into the world of the weird. Stories without the letter ‘e’. Stories with just dialogue. Stories inspired by a picture. More often, I go to unusual lengths – unusually small lengths.
Twiction: twitter fiction (can be any length, but 140 characters at a time). Join my piratical twitter tale by clicking on the link at left (it’s located above the story so far – read upward from August 1).
Flash: 1000 or less words
Drabble: 100 or less words
Dribble: 50 or less words
Hint fiction: 25 or less words
Hint fiction also has the quality that’s it’s not MEANT to be a story – not meant to show the reader who the character is; not meant to have a beginning, middle and end. It’s just a moment – and all the rest is just hinted at. The creepiest story I’ve ever read was hint fiction, which you can find here with the title “Progress” (not suitable for children – but everything is implied, of course):
http://www.robertswartwood.com/?page_id=78
There’s a really cool hint fiction competition getting run at the moment. Those who were at the flashmob yesterday would have read “Risk” which is one of my entries. If you want to know more, go here:
http://www.robertswartwood.com/?page_id=8
If you have an idea, the story is almost finished.
Flashmob a success
Yours truly
I am exhausted and still psyched (and aware of how lucky I have to be for this twittertale to succeed), but the launch did go well. The full report is at twittertales.wordpress.com
And I’ve edited and uploaded a 1.5 minute video on youtube, with the title, “Pirate Flashmob Canberra”.
Flashmob: Report
I’ve just returned victorious from the bizarro launch of the twitter tale – a pirate flashmob at Lyneham local shops in Canberra.
I’ll upload some videos (much edited) tomorrow.
We had quite a number of midget pirates, and one girl who insisted on coming as a dragon. A cutlass-wielding dragon.
Picking on someone her own size
Our attempts at looking normal were going well until this girl and her mum showed up, when we gave up the game and turned pirate ten minutes early.
At least two video cameras were filming, and one was deliberately skulking about 100 metres away. My father-in-law spotted them (a three-person crew) and the most logical explanation (unless those fiendish ninjas had HEAVILY described their nunchucks) was that it was WIN television.
The crowd was about fifty people, as I’d hoped, with about three groups of people I didn’t know – so yay for advertising.
We had lollies left over 🙂
These are DINOSAUR pirates (yes, that's what they're doing. No, I don't know why).
Felicity Banks 