Here’s a really engaging and powerful piece of short prose by Isaman Cann (Michelle Jones) published in Star 82 Review, one of those long-running journals that flies under the radar and keeps publishing excellent writing year after year:
https://www.star82review.com/12.4/cann-running.html
This story struck me when I first read it, in early January, because the arrival of a New Year has often – in the old tradition – prompted people to make New Plans: to introduce new habits/regimes/objectives, to start a new health kick, or to explore new experiences. And Cann’s micro – although not about New Year as such – amused me because it was exploring a different kind of mindset, an ‘anti-heroic’ or ‘anti-achiever’ one. The narrator is at a stage in life when they feel like it’s “time to generally lower the standards”. I loved how, after this initially amusing tone, the story ended up somewhere quite existential and poignant by the end, in only a few lines.
This piece also got me thinking about the different ways in which we can get to know the main characters in our writing – especially when we are working on a novella-in-flash (or any piece of long-form fiction).
In this piece, the narrator is talking about their relationship with exercise, specifically running in this instance. This is a way for the character/narrator to convey to the reader their relationship with their body. And it’s also a way for the character to convey their relationship with themselves.
For your novella-in-flash, have you thought yet about how your main character feels about their physical self? About their experience of their own body?
Invitation #1: Why not do some freewriting (in first-person POV) about this aspect of your main character’s identity – their relationship with their physical self?
Invitation #2: How might your insights into your main character’s experience of their own body be threaded into the chapters you’ve already written/planned for your novella? Take some time to brainstorm some notes.
And once you’ve done some freewriting, here are some prompts you might use to get going with a story for your novella-in-flash, following Isaman Cann’s story:
Continue reading Novella-in-Flash Writing Prompt #23 – The Body (Getting to Know Your Main Character)
The Novella-in-Flash 