A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-And-Eighty-Four

The major point of pushing myself to write flash fiction each day has been, in large part, as a way to just push myself until I felt more comfortable and capable writing short stories.  It is also, of course, part of the process of creating a portfolio of work, but the challenge I set myself specifically was aimed at the process of doing the work each day, of crafting a new story from start to finish daily.  They are, of course, short pieces, and the quality ranges a lot, but by doing this, I've gained a lot of understanding about my fiction.  I have a stronger sense of the kinds of stories that I am interested in writing, and of the areas that I want to explore with my work.  When I started, I had already written fiction that I feel is good, but I had never put in a concerted effort to put out short fiction on any kind of consistent basis.  By making a shift in terms of that, I have given myself a chance to develop and make new discoveries as a writer, and now, finally, I am starting to feel as if I am getting a handle on it in a real way.  Of course, just my saying that probably means that I'll find myself at a loss tomorrow.  But that is just one day.

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