Daniel Pink’s wonderful book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
For our purposes this week I am picking one resource in the story portfolio section- Write a Mini-Saga.
Mini-saga’s are just fifty words long and like all stories they should have a beginning, a middle and an ending. In 1999 the Telegraph ran a mini-saga contest, here are the guidelines that they outlined:
How to write a mini-saga
Your Mini-saga must be exactly 50 words long. (Hyphenated words can be counted as one word or two, at your discretion.) In addition it must carry a title of no more than 15 words, which will, ideally, set the scene and illuminate or counterpoint the text.
Most important, your story must have a beginning, a middle and an end. Something must happen, preferably something which will keep the reader thinking. Fifty dazzlingly deployed words of description or reflection will not do
As a note the contest is not currently running but the guidelines are helpful for our purposes here. Also I am not running a contest but using this to excercise our creative muscle.
For this week try and write a mini-saga a day. Remember it is just fifty words. Give it a try.
Here is my first mini-saga to start us off-
Aces
Lettie had just one leg, a good one nonetheless.
She lost the lousy left one in a card game, after cheating on the last hand causing an irate player to brandish his machete. Some people called it a tragedy, but, Lettie said it was lucky after losing her right shoe.
Did I say it had to be great? This is a first try. Play with the form. Like haiku’s the mini-saga makes you pare down your words and get concise.
Here are some topics you could use to write your mini-saga’s:
Loss, Anger, family, past, present time, polictics, transitions, aging, death, work, childhood.
Or just sit down and see what shows up when you put pen to paper or fingers to the keyboard.
If you want to – send me your sagas and I’ll post them at the end of the week. Fifty words, go!
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