100 word stories rely on a sense of the reader’s need, love, or disdain of nostalgia. Nostalgia is this rare ambiguous feeling that’s hard to describe, but we know it when we feel it. It creates a sense of forward and backward time, a place of being stuck in amber for the briefest of moments, where we just persist in a force field of feelings. There are better people than me to explain this phenomenon, but being writers, I trust that we agree with this particular feeling. This desire to live multiple lives, to be back in a different time and place. There’s an irony at play here, that either gains us the trust of the reader or is oft-putting if the irony is too simply divined. We don’t want a lifeguard dying of drowning kind of irony or the reliance on petty sarcastic dialogue. We want to see the world just a bit differently than it was given to us in our youth. These two micros (Links to an external site.) by Ruth LeFaive, give the reader plenty of opportunities to engage with the writer’s use of implication and their own opportunities to make inferences and dwell in this feeling of irony and nostalgia.
We Were Taught to Serve God and Country
"We were taught we could do anything in brown polyester jumpers—barely long enough to cover our bottoms—orange neckties of sorts, and felt beanie caps. We were taught to gather lint from our mothers’ dryers. This would make fresh-smelling kindling. We were taught to heat coals in flames, to wrap cardboard boxes in foil, to sing songs in rounds. These would make heat and ovens and harmony. We were taught to stir batter in the rain and stand tall. This would make cakes in the forest and girls too proud to climb trees."
I love the use of the collective we point of view here! This isn’t just one person’s memories, but this is a systematic teaching of what’s proper or good, and the unsaid or untaught is bad by virtue of this dichotomy! To have this in the singular point of view would make this sound more like complaining or a weepy look back at an earlier time in the narrator’s life. Notice how sensual the details are here! I’m taken right into each one of these moments. Each skill could be its own story, but the compaction here puts pressure on these teachings, makes us reexamine them from a different lens! That ending says it all without directly saying, right? The whole point of these teachings? To make them more like “girls” and less like “boys.” A perfect use of implication to get the reader to see nostalgia as a kind of weapon!
Prompt: Think about the teaching of any skill. There’s always a flip side, the thing that’s not taught, that’s being banished or hidden by the teacher, by society. Build us a character, a collective group that is being taught something, look at it from the vantage of time. What was taught explicitly, what was never mentioned...How can you provide this context, this tension between the said and the unsaid? Think of something you hated to be taught, something you loved being taught! How can you look at it as an adult? How can you look at it as an outsider? How does the unsaid imply the shift or movement? How can you make this a story rather than just a remembrance?
What I’m Reading:
Try At Home:
Think of something you’ve been trying to write about, but haven’t yet. Give yourself 100 words to see what you might find out about this topic, object, character, or plot. Keep writing if you can, giving yourself permission to just sit with this 100 word beginning. Move on to the next topic, object, character, or plot, and write another 100 words! Do this 5 times, switching after 100 words, and see if you have a start of something new or maybe something whole!
New Pop-up zoom class!
Thursday, October 28th from 3-4:30 EST!
100 word story generative zoom workshop on Pay what you can/want! Cap at 40 participants! (20 spaces left) Email me at thomasrdean13@gmail.com to secure your spot!
Class format: I provide models, give a bit of analysis of how the model is working, and then provide a prompt for each model story! Then I ask a few people to share what they wrote and provide positive feedback in the moment! Around 6-8 prompts total for the 1.5 hours!
"Tommy Dean’s flash fiction workshops are really fantastic. They are brimming with original and productive writing prompts. His lessons and examples are well-thought out, and the assignments are a wonderful combination of challenging and accessible. In addition, his comments are sharp and help you to see what your strengths are, as well as deftly pointing out what you might want to add or take away. This, in addition to a wonderful group of other students that are in the workshops, really blend to make a perfect workshop experience. His private editorial feedback is also wonderful. Very quick turnaround, great observations, and very generous with his time. Highly, highly recommended." -Francine Witte, author of The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon and Dressed All Wrong for This