Ernest Hemingway once said ““The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.”
Hemingway knew more than he was saying when he said it takes a lifetime to learn how to write. I’m only just about to be 25 and I’m just now beginning to scratch the surface of what I think my talent may one day produce. Whether any of it gets seen is another matter entirely.
Besides being a master of the short story, Hemingway also knew how to write novels. Great novels, in fact (my favorite Hemingway piece is In Our Time, in case anyone cares, which is a collection of short stories technically.) But one thing Hemingway also had in his time were publishers willing to take higher risks on unknowns and a changing time that readers at the time responded to well with his work. With the internet today, writers no longer have the luxury of publishers behind them or time to react to the changing mood in writing.
Thus, I find myself having to invariably do things on my own. I prefer it this way actually, having some freedom of artistic choice while keeping up with market trends. It also means I have to produce a lot more work.
One way of getting more writing done is flash fiction, a genre that typically sees stories 250 words or less. These stories will be like Snow Storm which I thought was a good first attempt at the genre.
These stories will be posted on Fictionaut for a week on beginning on Wednesday with Around Town, and then published on the website after the week is up.
I hope that everyone will enjoy these new stories and will provide feedback on if they like them or not.
