Authors Electric

Not long before my recent unplanned trip to hospital via the sea wall at Silverknowes (see picture), I completed a short series of sessions which involved writing 5 very short stories in 5 days in a genre I’d never consciously attempted before – creative non-fiction. It did occur to me that maybe my family history account would ideally fall into that category, though as the 5 days progressed, I realised this seemed like a different thing altogether. Most of the stories I saw copied to the associated Facebook group as the week progressed seemed to be based on memoir, sometimes with a lot of emotion and soul-searching, though as far as I know these are not essential to the genre. But perhaps that was because the writing prompts steered us towards this kind of thing. There was a theme for each of the 100-word stories. The word count was very precise – I realised afterwards that I had written a number of Drabbles of that same length, but they were fiction, which I found much easier. I ...