Speed Stories

So my last post was a short story I cranked out in about 2 hours. It was meant to be one hour, but it wasn't finished then and it's part of my current efforts to do more in less time. Spending less time refining and getting stuff out there, mostly inspired by Michael Doig's recent posting of lunchtime sketches and other 'speed' focused work from artists in his Artchemical group on Facebook.

So the idea of 'speed stories' is tied to my goal to write more in general this year. I have one major project of 'converting' my RPG story into prose (there's not much converting really, more connecting the dots between plot points). The problem with that is it will take forever and still not be finished so what I needed is something ultra short, a snapshot or sketch of a story, that I can fire out quickly.

There's no hard and fast rule to speed stories, other than they're hard, and fast! My initial target was write a story in an hour, same as the lunchtime sketches, but stories are a little different (or so i tell myself) and cant be left without some sort of resolution, so I set a new limit of 1000 words instead of an hour, but I hit that as I was writing the ending, so my final limit was 2 hours, because I really had to stop!

For a speed story, you just pick a topic and start writing. I had a vague idea of the story when I started, having been talking about time travel concepts earlier that day, but it wasnt essential.
I'm pretty happy with the outcome, although I'd still really like to go back to it and make the ending better, and generally refine and flesh it out but I probably never will. Too many new stories to write!