How are you feeling today? Maybe you feel like I do: Anxious, fraught with unease and uncertainty. It’s a feeling we normally seek to escape, right? Today I’m asking you to lean into your uncertainty and use it in your writing.
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart…live in the question.” ~Rainer Maria Rilke – Letters to a Young Poet
Your prompt then is this:
Maybe have a bit of fun with the rarely used omniscient POV. Adopt an odd all-seeing voice perhaps. Then give us a character who is mired in uncertainty. Shit’s about to go down, either dramatically or more subtly. The uncertainty will be deeply uncomfortable for your character, but deliciously compelling for your reader. Your first line should go something like this:
“[Character name] doesn’t know [about the thing that’s about to happen to the world or to herself]…”
Take it from there. Go where the writing takes you. Set off without a map or compass or plan. Lean into uncertainty in today’s practice..
Kathy Fish has been writing, teaching, and editing flash fiction for over 20 years. She has published five collections of short fiction, most recently Wild Life: Collected Works from 2003-2018. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Washington Square Review, and numerous other journals, textbooks, and anthologies. Fish’s widely anthologized “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild,” was selected for Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018 and the current edition of The Norton Reader. She is the recipient of a Ragdale Foundation Fellowship and a Copper Nickel Editors’ Prize. Her free monthly newsletter, The Art of Flash Fiction, includes a craft article and writing prompt. Subscribe at artofflashfiction.com .
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2 thoughts on “Bonus Unexpected Sabbatical Prompt: March 17”
Open Your Art Flash Fiction Retreats 
Oh my, that got rid of a lot of today’s angst!
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I’m glad to hear it, Sue!
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