A flash fiction story is a very short story. This flash fiction writing prompt is based on one presented at the recent Stockholm Writers’ Festival (SWF24).
SWF24
The Festival venue this year was the Swedish History Museum. The museum’s collections cover archaeology and history in the geographical area we now call Sweden, from the Stone Age to the present. Among the notable collections are materials from the Viking period (c. 800-c. 1050), and fabulous gold and silver treasures kept in the museum’s Gold Room display vault.
Much of the museum’s 52 kg of gold and 200+ kg of silver was discovered buried around Sweden over the past 200 years. Troves of treasure, found by chance or through archaeological excavation, are the legal property of the state. By law, the state pays a generous finders’ fee, which is based on the metal value of the gold or silver. However the treasure itself is brought to Stockholm, to the History Museum, where it is preserved, studied and displayed.
During the SWF24, at the end of the first day on Friday 23rd August, participants were sent off to view the Viking collection and then had a brief guided tour of the Gold Room.
For those of us who wanted to take part, we were assigned a flash fiction task: Find inspiration in an item or a display in the collection and write a 100 word story. We had 24 hours to write and submit the story. The winning entry was read out at the very end of the Festival on Sunday 25th August.
Flash the first
So, here is your Pensive writing prompt for this week. Either visit a local museum, a second-hand/charity store or a vintage/antique market … or peruse the photographs on this page. (There are more pictures if you scroll down.) Let yourself be inspired by one or more of the objects you see.
Write a 100 word story. It must be a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end (though not necessarily in that order). It may not be poetry. It must have exactly 100 words, no more, no less.
Flash the second
After you have let the flash fiction story rest for a day or a week, return to it and rewrite it from a different perspective. The same story, but seen differently.
If the first time you told the story it was in the third person, try writing now in the first person.
If the first time you were writing from the perspective of an archaeologist finding an ancient object, now write the same story from the perspective of the object itself. Or from the perspective of the person who buried the object.
If the first time you wrote from your own point of view, discovering the object in a market, now rewrite the story from the point of view of the salesperson who sold it to you.
The same rules apply: 100 words only, a beginning, a middle, an end. No poetry. Enjoy!
We did a similar writing exercise with a local writing group a few years ago, writing inspired by an evening visit to the local museum, which houses such varied objects as a large collection of stuffed birds, a canoe of the sort used by John Rae in the Hudson’s Bay area, a small bone Neolithic carving etc.. We didn’t have a word limit, but took our fledgling pieces and made then into short stories the following session.
Museums are great places for the beginnings of stories, both short and flash pieces.