Flash365 by Calum Kerr: a story every day for a year

Me

I’d like to introduce you to a project being undertaken by a Calum Kerr, a colleague of mine at the University of Winchester. On his blog at flash365 he is posting a new flash fiction every day for a year. He only started on 1st May so there are still plenty for you to anticipate and enjoy.

As well as being an interesting place to stop off for a short read every day, what Calum is doing is excellent discipline, that any aspiring writer can learn from. As he himself has said, the more he writes, the more ideas he has for other writing. This is always true: if you exercise your writing muscle frequently, you will automatically start to notice more things to write about. It’s especially powerful if you make a commitment to writing every day, because then you’ve really got to look hard! And it helps you to get over procrastinating excuses for not writing.

It’s an idea that I thoroughly recommend. I did it myself last summer: a poem a day for about a month, literally about what I observed every morning in tiny our back garden, at roughly the same time each day – whenever our baby took her first nap! It’s tremendously invigorating, especially if (like me) you’re a perfectionist who worries about quality so much that most of the time you forget to actually write. If you just tell yourself that the quality doesn’t matter so long as you do it, then of course some poems/stories will be rubbish, but others will surprise you with with good qualities coming seemingly from nowhere.

Making it public of course is another step altogether, but why not? In the context of a long project, I think you’ve got nothing to lose: no-one will expect genius every day. The interest is in watching someone take on the commitment, and seeing the collection grow.

So why not give it a try – maybe for a shorter time first, as Calum did for his pamphlet 31. Email me if you take it on – I’ll be interested to read your work.

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