“I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them — without a thought about publication — and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.”
“We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings… Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.”
A new week means a new writing challenge — this time we’ll be practising writing Sci-Fi flash. Whether you’ve never written a sci-fi story before or do it all the time, this is a great opportunity to step away from your regular writing schedule. Get out of your comfort zone and try something new.
Sci-fi is a broad genre with many different niches. Even if you’re not a fan, writing a brief sci-fi story will broaden your horizons. You don’t have to be an astrophysicist to write sci-fi. Most readers don’t appreciate crazy equations and massive info dumps about black holes anyway.
Flash or the very short story is the perfect medium for experiments like this. Opinions on how many words count as flash divide. For the purposes of this challenge, let’s say it’s about 1,000 words. You can do that in a week.
When writing flash, I like to build the story around a climatic moment or twist. Then I work backwards to figure out the beginning and the middle. When working on world-building-heavy stuff like sci-fi, it’s easy to get bogged down before there even is a story to be told.
Let’s say this wealthy old lady has a robot arm. She’s eating breakfast in bed when the arm grabs her neck and starts strangling her. She’s struggling with it for a bit, trying to reach the emergency kill switch, but it isn’t there. Someone removed it. The arm kills her.
Who was she? Who did this and why? A freaky malfunction? A disgruntled servant? Perhaps an heir infected her arm with a virus to get an early payout? But why did this elderly woman have a bionic limb in the first place? What if she’s the villain and someone she wronged many years ago got their revenge at last?
You can make it a thriller or a mystery from here. And you have a story.
The Challenge
Spend an hour or more working on sci-fi flash fiction this week. Don’t worry if the story doesn’t come out perfect. The goal is to have fun and exercise your “writing muscle”.
If you’d like to write along, join this challenge in Writing Analytics:
I built a Chrome browser extension for writers last week, and I’m happy to announce that it’s finally live. It’s called Writing Inspiration, and it will show you a quote about writing every time you open a new tab!
It comes with hundreds of quotes on writing from the world’s best authors. It also has dozens of beautiful, high-res backgrounds to get you in the mood for writing. You’ll get a fresh quote every day.
I used a bunch of similar extensions over the years, but I didn’t find any made for writers. Stumbling upon the right nugget of writing wisdom at the right time can change your life.
The features include:
Hundreds of quotes about writing, updated daily.
Dozens of inspiring photos from libraries around the world.
Click on the author’s name to discover more quotes from them.
Time & date
The extension is free (and will stay free). It doesn’t track usage or any other data about you.
You can find and install it from the Chrome Web Store:
If you enjoy using the extension, it would mean the world to me if you could leave a review. It lets me know that I should keep working on it and helps other writers discover it as well.
“On first drafts: It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut — it’s the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.”
“I’ve found most authors have the wrong mental picture of the process. Instead of a sprint, publishing is more like a marathon. Slow, steady and consistent action will get you your audience and success.”
“I also learn a lot about everybody else’s process. People create in different ways, so that has opened me up to different processes and experimenting.”
It’s a common misconception that a daily writing habit takes a huge amount of time and effort to maintain. It doesn’t.
With the right tools and systems in place, it can be as leisurely as a walk in a park. You don’t have to lose sleep over it. You don’t have to chain-smoke cigarettes. You don’t have to quit your job and move into the woods to do it.
I’m not sure what is causing this sentiment — perhaps memories from when you joined NaNoWriMo and tried writing thousands of words daily (or a similar push to hit a crazy deadline). While it can work for some, most writers don’t write thousands of words every day like that.
This week, I want to challenge you to write for just ten minutes every day. There’s no daily word count goal. If you sit there for ten minutes and nothing comes out, that’s a success too.
From Dreamer to Writer
Hang on a second. How can you get anything done with just ten minutes per day? I’m glad that you asked!
If you stick to it, you’ll write for just over an hour per week, five hours per month and 60 hours per year. According to my writing stats, I average about 1,500 words per hour. That’s 90,000 words per year. I’m not a particularly fast writer, but even if you did half of that, you’re still in the 50,000 words/year range.
That’s a lot of words, considering you’re only writing for 10 minutes a day. But there’s more.
Occasionally, you’ll be in the mood for writing. Your ten minutes fly past, and you’re nowhere near done. Maybe you write for 30 minutes, perhaps an hour, working on an exciting chapter of your story.
The words add up faster than you think.
The Challenge
Starting today, write for at least ten minutes per day for a week. You may work on your current WIP, write a short story, blog post or journal.
There’s no word goal. As long as you sit down to write, it’s a success!
I set up a challenge in Writing Analytics if you’d like to join:
One great thing about WA is that you can set and track time goals for your writing sessions. That makes it super easy to build a writing habit like that:
“Writing is really a way of thinking – not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.”
