I was first introduced to this idea on Jeffrey Callison's Sacramento NPR radio interview show called Insight. He interviewed Jason Sinclair Long about his blog "Flash Fiction 365". You can hear the interview here.
The challenge is to write a micro-story each day. The length of the story is determined by throwing a pair of dice, preferably of different colors. One color represents the tens digit and the other the ones digit. So the story can be from 11 to 66 words. Of course some lengths are left out using this method. You could also use one die and throw it twice. Or use a die with 8 sides. Or you can do what I did and create a random number generator in Excel. This method doesn't miss any of the numbers. Mine will return a random number between 11 and 99. I am happy to share the formula if you email me.
The title is not part of the word count. Most word processors have a word count function that is very useful. You can start with a title or add it later or you can have someone suggest a title. Even though the original idea is to write a story, I plan to include poetry and perhaps essay.
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Sunday, October 30, 2005
It Starts
Unreal realizations are how the world looks to us. That is, we live in an illusion but refuse to believe it. We believe that the world reported to us by our transducers (eyes, ears, etc.) is the real world. Even more, we believe that this limited view is mostly all there is of the world. How unreal is that!
These transducers have a limited bandwidth. The eyes only see colors from red to purple. The ears only hear from roughly (depending on age) 20Hz to 15,000Hz. We only smell a small fraction of what a dog smells. And we can only detect with our touch down to about a millimeter or so. This is what our perception of the world is built on. How unreal is that!
The best that we can do is to acknowledge our sensory limitations and as the question, "Is there another way of knowing the world that is not limited by our transducers?"
These transducers have a limited bandwidth. The eyes only see colors from red to purple. The ears only hear from roughly (depending on age) 20Hz to 15,000Hz. We only smell a small fraction of what a dog smells. And we can only detect with our touch down to about a millimeter or so. This is what our perception of the world is built on. How unreal is that!
The best that we can do is to acknowledge our sensory limitations and as the question, "Is there another way of knowing the world that is not limited by our transducers?"
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