Flash Fiction Friday Challenge: Week 3

Hello, friends! Yesterday was the third Flash Fiction Friday challenge for the month of August! I can barely believe we only have one left. It seems like I was just planning this not that long ago, yet here we are, almost to the end.

This week’s prompt: Sleeping suddenly becomes unnecessary… For most people.

As I’ve said in the past, I created all the prompts for this month’s challenge, and I was most nervous for this one. The moment I thought of it, I knew it was going to have some element of Sci-Fi in it, a genre I’m not good at writing and don’t particularly care to read. There’s nothing wrong with it; it just doesn’t pique my interest. Now, you might be thinking, “Why in the world didn’t you just think of a different one and not use this one if you were nervous about writing it?” Great question! The purpose of this challenge is to do exactly that: challenge me. I should write things that are outside of my comfort zone, and I should try to create stories for prompts that I don’t find to be particularly inspiring. It’s a good way to exercise my writing muscle and challenge my brain to find ways around my first train of thought.

Additionally, something that I constantly struggle with is the idea that something I’ve written isn’t “great” or “perfect.” As a writer, and I think you’ll find that many other creatives agree, I’m never really happy with my work. There’s always something I’d like to change, something to edit, something to delete or add in. I’ve had to work very hard at the skill of telling myself when enough is enough, and this prompt was a good way to again tell myself, “This story doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be the most amazing story in the world. You just have to write it.”

As it is, I went over the word limit when I wrote this story and, surprisingly, it’s the longest story that I’ve written this month by about six words. That’s not much, but I think it’s a great achievement considering all the all the reservations I had about writing it in the first place.

In an effort to not give too much away but still entice you to read the story, I’ll give you this for the synopsis: On a random Sunday night, most of the population wakes up at 3 a.m., no longer feeling tired. For one young man, however, this is not the case. A series of dreams a few weeks later leads him to the answer to this mystery, but it’s an answer he really didn’t expect.

As I’ve said each week, the story you’ll read when you click on the link below is a story in a raw form. It’s been very lightly edited, but for the most part, is written exactly how the words came to me. It needs some work, but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless. If you’d like to read it, click here.

I’d like to say thank you to @soultouchingpoetry on Instagram for completing the challenge with me again this week. You can find their submitted fill by visiting their Instagram page (linked above). If you like it, please follow them on Instagram to read more of their poetry!

Total August word count: 23996

Thank you for coming back to my blog! There will be a new newsletter out tomorrow with a fresh new piece of writing that you won’t find anywhere else as well as sneak peeks at some of the other fiction I’ve been writing this month! If you’d like to receive a copy of my newsletter, you can sign up below by typing in your email address and clicking “Submit”! I’ll be back next Saturday with my very last piece of Flash Fiction for the month. Have a great week, everyone!