Category Archives: Stories

Mini-saga Week

How-To, Stories

Daniel Pink’s wonderful book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, is full of creative ideas. In part two of the book he introduces the six senses; design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning. After each sense he gives us a portfolio of resources. I am not doing the book justice at all so please go out and pick it up.

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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Left out…

Stories, ,

This past week I have mentioned a Tweetup that I attended that left me feeling a bit like the odd person out. Indeed I was.

This particular Tweetup was very near to me and I knew one person from Twitter who I hadn’t met in person so I thought it would be fun. I went to the location and ran into some people talking about the Tweetup. It was a small group and everyone did seem to know each other and I was the unknown factor in the group. Nonetheless, it seemed to go well and I was glad to meet new people who were local to me.

Afterward, when I got home I Twittered about it and listed the people I met. The people I hadn’t known I followed with a message. A couple of them replied back. All is good. But, I noticed that the people in the group mentioned the Tweetup and those in attendance, except for me. Pictures were posted and I was not in them. Sad face > 🙁  .

I felt like the pitiful ten year old from grade school who wore glasses, was too skinny and too darn shy to make her life a better place. I wondered if I had violated some unspoken, yet learned Twitter rule of socializing. I went back at looked at the Tweets mentioning the event and the messages were all open invitations to join the group. At that point I decided to pull up my socks a bit and smack myself in the back of the head a few times and get over my sorry self. And I decided the other people were just plain rude.

I don’t know if it was a name game, mention the celebrities kind of thing, or, that everyone really knew each other in one way or another so I was not intentionally left out. I was not on the radar at all. My feelings at the moment were hurt. I had a good time with them. But, this is life and not everyone will get me or care about me. So when I encounter that kind of treatment I move on. There are other people who I will like and who’ll like me. Truthfully, life is too short to nurse certain kind of wounds.

But, I have mentioned it this week because I have been thinking so much about relationship. There are those I have with family and friends and the relationships with clients and colleagues. I don’t like everybody. Unless you are down right evil, I will do my best to be nice, keep in touch and remember to acknowledge you. When I forget to do that my true friends will remind me. They will tell me if I have ignored them too long. I want to be able to tell to my friends when I need some loving. There are so many ways I can keep in touch with people. I want to remember that particular Tweetup because I don’t want to ignore someone else. I will do my best.