AWP has been oddity, curiosity, and overwhelming surge of bookness. It’s much larger than I expected and very difficult to process the sensory overload that accompanies such great numbers of people. I haven’t been to a long-ish conference in a couple months, and I remember every reason why I don’t like them. But I have learned a great deal: some about craft, some about publishing, some about the writing life. I thank my lucky stars for seeing friends and teachers; were I to have done this alone, I would have given up after the first session, retreated to my cave, and pledged to write another month of microfiction.

I’ve managed to limit my spending on books thusfar, as well, which is good. I’ll probably drop another $50 or so tomorrow afternoon as people are packing up.

My month of microfic is over, and I’m planning to sit down and evaluate the results when I get settled in at home. I feel excited about having accomplished it, and am pretty sure that a poem or two will spring forward as a result of these little stories. The most interesting part of the experiment was learning what my preoccupations are right now; I don’t think I’d realized.

I’m certain that eventually, someone will tell me that the creative well has run dry and will ask for some help. Last semester, I had two students commit to “the seven day challenge,” in which I had them write a poem each day based on a very specific– and sometimes very difficult– assignment. The point, of course, was not to create seven excellent poems. The point was to fail to write seven good poems, and fail spectacularly, because isn’t that creative block simply an unwillingness to be bad, really really bad? The month of microfic took that sentiment and drew it out into a month, and I had even more permission to suck because I’m not a fiction writer and no one expects me to be.

I read earlier in the year that New Year’s Resolutions (caps for emphasis) tend to fail because they’re unrealistic and they have no end date. The first time you waver, there’s nothing to strengthen your resolve, because no end is in sight. Making a pledge to change a behavior for 30 days is a much more reasonable way to effect change– you have a strong chance of being successful, and at the end of the 30 days, you can evaluate how the change affected you and whether or not you want to continue.

So, here’s my new prescription… let’s call it White’s Month of Microfic for Poets. (Fiction writers, feel free to complete the assignment by writing poetry.) The rules are as follows:

1. You must write an entry each day.
2. You must make the entry public to one reader or many. If you do not, you are not allowing yourself full permission to fail. Failure kept private is simply guilt. However, you should never apologize for the quality of the work when making it public; in fact, you probably need not even mention that you’re engaged in this microfic exercise.
3. Do not solicit comments. (You’ll get some unsolicited praise, in all likelihood, but if you know you plan to fail, why solicit criticism? You can do better by soliciting criticism on your later successes.)
4. You must write for a maximum of fifteen minutes.
5. You may only revise in the last three minutes of the exercise.
6. You may not have an idea when you sit down to write. If you have an idea already, make a note of it and develop it outside your month of microfic. If the idea was good enough to make you want to write, a) your month is already working, and b) you won’t want to fail. You’ll probably want more than fifteen minutes to develop your idea, anyhow.
7. Since you probably won’t know where to begin, try one of the following:
   • steal a line from a song and use it as a first line or a last line
   • use Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button to research a word you picked at random from the dictionary
   • listen to someone’s conversation and make something overheard into the last line of your story
   • write something boring or mundane that happened to you recently but imagine that you are somehow dramatically altered (in my case, I was usually dead… of course, to make sure my mother didn’t freak out, I used my three minutes revision time to take the story out of first person)

If you decide to go for it, drop me a comment. If you have a blog with RSS, I’ll happily be one of your readers.

If you stuck with Little Fury during February, I really appreciate you reading. Most entries will stay up, as is; those that are transformed into poems later will come down when that happens.