⚡Day 14. One sentence.
Going long.
Welcome to the fourth and final week of Flash February. You’re doing great. So far we’ve: searched for inspiration, nudged our anecdotes towards stories, and played with form a little bit. This week, we’re exploring how structural constraints can foster creativity.
Yesterday, we played with extreme brevity. Today, we’re going to push a sentence to its limits.
PROMPT #14
The one-sentence story often teeters at the edge of chaos. It can be a fun way to experiment with breathlessness; it can also be a satisfying formal challenge, as you marshall sentence structure and punctuation in order to keep the plates spinning.
For example, in “Happy Birthday,” Nicholas Dighiera begins and ends a story on his son’s fifteenth birthday but loops back through time, with the help of a lot of commas, to document his failures as a father. In “Literally Any,” Jeanette Mrozinski goes in search of hope and (at the end of a very long day and many parentheses) finds it in a most unlikely place.
How much can you fit in one sentence?
You could start fresh today, but like yesterday’s prompt, this can be a good revision exercise. Consider where you’ll start and where you’ll end: the frame story of a one-sentence story often (though not always) moves forward chronologically and is in present tense. Think about how a refrain or a repetition of a punctuation element (paired em-dashes or parentheses, for example) can help you add another layer to a frame story; semi-colons can also come in handy.
Share: The first hundred or so words of your sentence/story.
PS/ As a reminder, Flash February pauses mid-week for the regular Short Reads email (which you can subscribe to here for free). See you back here on Thursday!
MOVING DAY- CREATIVE NON-FICTION
Well, it’s day one of our newest move, cause that’s what we do in this family, is move a lot, and I’m waiting for the furniture men to show up and I have no idea what the future holds at this point, but hopefully, it will hold a very special doctor sent to me by God to fix my severely damaged back but who knows really, because the VA sure promised a lot but didn’t deliver, so Dave went back to work for me, which is hard for me to take since I just got him to retire three years ago.
This Me, That Me
It’s sweltering in this kitchen, every burner lit and the oven humming along, churning out a meal that should be illegal in the desert, because, I mean, really, who likes cranberry sauce, and how those New England pilgrims would blanch at the sight of a saguaro cactus, sweat dribbling beneath their layers of linen and wool, heat rising like anxiety, like fear, like Mom growling at the gravy that won’t come together, like my shoulders that climb toward my ears as the dish tower lists precariously, a prayer briefly crossing my mind as I stack yet another pan, like fingers crossed at the forced cheer, if I believe it hard enough then I will feel that old giddy anticipation of tuning the TV to the right channel to catch the parade, the joy of shredding impossibly soft white bread, the smile as Grandma wheezes, bent double with laughter, as Grandpa chokes down a scrim of pumpkin puree from a can, determined not to waste a single ounce, and maybe then I won’t clock how everything feels off now,