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Forget About Prompts to Write Flash Fiction; You Need Your Eyes
How many out there are offering you prompts in the hundreds to get you started on a story? You don’t need any of them because you have exactly what you need now—your eyes.
Writing stories or articles isn’t rocket science, but so many will offer “the way” to do any of it that we are left wondering if there is a way that is right and one that is wrong. Recently, the Nobel Prize was awarded to an author who seemed to do it “all wrong” because he wrote his novel in one long, uninterrupted sentence. Well, William Faulkner did almost the same thing.
Guinness World Records recognized William Faulkner in 1983 as the author of the “Longest Sentence in Literature” for his 1,288-word sentence found in Absalom, Absalom! James Joyce wrote a 4,391-word sentence in Ulysses.
Long sentences were a favorite form of writing for many authors, including Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as Charles Dickens. Now that we have stellar examples of very famous authors who wrote the likes of “run-on” sentences, we have to begin to question some of the advice that is being doled out to the rest of us. I have no idea what makes their run-on sentences better than mine or yours. We have to ask: what’s acceptable and what’s “good” writing?
