Just for fun, this week I decided to post some of the micro-stories that I’ve written so far. These were all assignments for an online course that I’m taking; an introduction to fiction writing. Even though I’ve been diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) due to my rare disease, it’s important that I keep challenging my brain.
A great way to do that is to try to learn new things, so I’ve also signed up for some art classes and lectures. Each of these activities has to be of a short duration, though, because my MCI means that I can’t concentrate or focus for more than an hour at a time – and sometimes even less than that.
The online fiction-writing course is fantastic for this, because it’s a go-at-your-own-pace program. Each week there are a dozen or so very brief modules to complete, some as quick as a two-minute video clip ‘-)
It’s been a lot of fun to take a stab at writing fiction; definitely a change from the fact-based writing that I do here on the blog! Speaking of facts, here’s an interesting one for my rare condition; Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS).
Although CRPS is considered to be both an autoimmune and a neuro-inflammatory disease, it is generally treated through multidisciplinary pain management clinics. This is because many of its multiple symptoms involve different types of pain, leading CRPS to be viewed by clinicians and researchers as a chronic pain disease.
And creative writing can help with patients’ self-management of pain and certain other symptoms:
“People with chronic pain need tools and skills for optimal adaptation.
Furnes & Dysvik; Journal of Clinical Nursing: Pain Management; Dec 2012
Our findings suggest therapeutic writing may… be used as a tool to express individual experiences and to improve adaptation to chronic pain.”(1)
With any luck, this more creative style of writing will help me manage my pain as well as help prevent any further increases in my CRPS-related mild cognitive impairment – by forcing my brain to learn new skills and to think in different ways.
I hope you’ve enjoyed some of the other micro-stories that I’ve posted this week… and here are a few more. Each of these was written in response to a specific course assignment, with specific requirements – word limits, what aspect to focus on, etc. – so I’ve included some of the instructions before each micro-tale ‘-)
This assignment was to create a vivid image, in eighty-five words or less, the face of a stranger that you had seen within the past week. My husband had been with me, when I saw this person, and he knew right away who I meant from my written description… so I suppose that means that it was accurate:
“As she looked up from her phone, to reply to my query, I could see her eyes for the first time. They were brown, close-set over a face so thin that it appeared almost skeletal. Sallow skin rested directly over the facial bones, with no flesh to pad out the cheekbones, jaw, or nose.
Sandra Woods; Introduction to fiction writing, course assignment; 2020
Her eye sockets were the deepest I’d ever seen, dark caverns of despair. She was young, maybe in her late teens or early twenties, but her face looked haunted.”
For this longer exercise, each course participant had to create a storyline about a specific area of the world. The story had to involve at least three elements of research, and one factual personal event or fact. The idea was to begin with a place you know, and then add in three or more additional details – from research – to make the place more real to readers. I’ve marked my four researched facts with asterisks(*), so you can recognize them:
“The first part of the trail ran parallel to the highway, which wasn’t what you’d expect from a “get away from it all” hike in the mountains. One guidebook accurately described the start of the trail as “very low profile and nondescript”.* For this couple, that was part of its charm.
They’d followed this path many times, and knew that they’d soon be leaving the sounds of civilization – of cars, trucks, and buses – behind. The unappealing start, along with the steep climb that followed it, were a bonus. The combined to prevent this particular summit from becoming too popular with tourists.
The past twenty-five years had brought many changes to the area, not all of them as good as that new craft brewery. People now seemed to want to feel that they were entering the wilderness the moment they slammed their car doors. But that wasn’t how the wilderness worked, not here.
Sure, it felt as though you could reach out and touch it, just by sticking an arm out the car window along the few roads through these forests. And occasionally a moose would even venture into a village, wreaking havoc along Main Street during the summer season. But it took some effort to get into the true wilderness of this mountain range. At least a few solid hours of hiking or snowshoeing, well away from the most popular areas.
When they’d first begun hiking these mountain trails together, all those years ago, they usually wouldn’t see another soul during the course of an entire day. Then camping and outdoor sports suddenly became popular in the last decade of the 2000s, even here.
Many local residents had thought it was a good thing, more tourist dollars for the towns’ and villages’ economies, right? Wrong. Chain stores moved into the largest towns, competing with local businesses for prime locations and raising the rents beyond their reach. Generations-old businesses in smaller villages suffered, as more and more retail space was converted to restaurants and tourist-trap shops. Every second or third door in business districts was now a fancy restaurant or pretentious café, too expensive for its employees to ever dream of eating there.
One resilient town had bucked the trend, just a bit, by creating its own department store. Shares had been sold at a hundred dollars each, available to state residents only and with a maximum of ten thousand dollars’ worth of shares per person.* The store had successfully opened in 2011, a decade after the town’s last general or mercantile store had closed.* That was just one store, though, among the many towns scattered among and between these mountains.
The truth had slowly dawned on the people whose families had built these hamlets and villages; the popularity of the ‘great outdoors’ was a curse. Just twenty years ago, there would be about five thousand people a year hiking up to one of the popular mountain viewpoints; fifteen years later, foot traffic on that trail had swelled to thirty-five thousand hikers a year.*”
Sandra Woods; Introduction to fiction writing, course assignment; 2020
To close out the week, tomorrow I’ll post the longest of my fiction stories so far – it will be our own little Fiction Friday ‘-)
Have a lovely day! And if you’re in the path of the big winter storm, brewing here in northeastern North America, stay warm and safe!
Reference
(1) Bodil Furnes and Elin Dysvik. Therapeutic writing and chronic pain: experiences of therapeutic writing in a cognitive behavioural programme for people with chronic pain. Journal of Clinical Nursing: Pain Management. Dec 2012. Vol 21, issue 23-24, 3372-3381. ePub 09 Oct 2012. Online: doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2702.2012.04268.x. Accessed 06 Feb 2020:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2702.2012.04268.x