Rough Draft

Our school has begun a writing club and I attended the first meeting. It is a student club, and I was the only faculty member there aside from the faculty sponsor. We will meet every month or so and share writing samples. Why am I participating? Mostly because I would like to work on my "skills" as a writer. I would one day like to write a book that people will actually read...Anyway, our assignment for this Sunday's meeting is flash fiction.

Flash fiction (not to be confused with Flash Gordon) is a literary artiface, somewhat similar to a haiku. Except different. What it shares with haiku, I suppose, is that it it places extreme limitations on the writer and forces writing into (hopefully) creative directions. Our assignment was to write a work of fiction in less than 100 words. Here's what I came up with...

Mary looked up from the newspaper. “Jack, what do you know. Do you remember that high school guidance counselor, the one that said little Jimmy wasn’t ‘college material’?”

“Ummm-hmmmm” replied Jack as he carefully poured out the honey on his biscuits. With a satisfied turn of the wrist, he managed both to stop the flow of honey out of the jar and twist the lid back into place at the same time.

“She uhhh…she died. Last night in a car accident she was killed on Buncombe road.”

Jack was silent for a moment. “Well….she wasn’t very good at her job.”

That's the best I could come up with in a first draft.