Creativity Workshop: Week in Review

So here we are at another Monday and my week in review is a day late - as always.

This 4-week segment of the Creativity Workshop is, of course, my self-challenge to experiment with writing in different genres. This week past I was going to write a short story in the horror fiction genre. Why? I don't know. I don't read horror, per se, and I don't watch horror movies, but I decided to write a horror story because it was so far outside of my comfort zone as to be a serious challenge.

At first I was like, WTF am I going to write?! I considered something zombie-related, but decided against it (maybe another time). I was finally inspired for a story idea by a comment made by one of my MFA colleagues on our online workshop. He said, about another colleague's poetry, "I felt like painting a giant, dark, wall-sized abstract painting and scratching those poems into it with a bloody knife." Great compliment, eh?! So anyway, that inspired me to write a horror flash fiction. I know it's kind of a cop-out to write flash fiction for a creativity workshop, but I actually think it worked well. Sometimes super-short can be super-compelling.

So what genre am I going to attempt this week? Western. Yep, pardner. I've had an idea for a western novel for a while now so I'm going to start exploring that in greater depth. Again, not sticking strictly to the short story form, but it's a creativity workshop and this is my opportunity to push myself into a place where I'm not necessarily comfortable, but a place I need to go nonetheless. Otherwise I'm likely to keep pushing this story down the "to-do" list until I never do it.

This week I'll work on doing some character studies (they're not going to be the same old overdone cowboys - MC is a woman), do some research into the old west for the purposes of becoming familiar with setting (maybe reread some Louis L'Amour?), do some brief outlining, then start writing the story.