Take your favorite three photographs you made this semester and a piece of micro fiction of up to 500 words. We will do two different drafts, one is a rough draft, and the 2nd will be nice and polished, the kind of thing someone would want to read in a magazine.
How will the three images fit together, that’s up for you to decide, you are the storyteller, you get to be the one who calls the shots.
What is micro Fiction? A story containing less than 300 words. But it’s not exact, so 500 words in about the length of a micro or piece of flash fiction.
Don’t try to tell a huge 200 page story in 300 words, focus instead on the three moments contained in the three photographs.
For these three images, I see a car ride, maybe three different moments of a larger story, that’s all I’m going to write about.
Image 1, the car.
We where there, in masks and whigs, and sunglasses on a gray Portland afternoon. The salesman was on the other line. They didn’t stop to notice, the heaving bag of cash, the little dollar bills taking off in the wind that Dorothy was able to rein them back in and that we got as far as Nebraska without stopping was indeed some kind of miracle.
I let the image of the red car tell me the story it had to tell. I was patient, not rushed, that car had things to tell me, all I had to do was listen.
Image 2, the Billboard
We got as far as Kansas until the clouds came in. Big thick dark ones with fat rain drops. Too wet for the convertible. Of course the sales guy didn’t tell us we had a rip in the canopy. Hard enough ratcheting it up in the middle of a downpour. And yeah you are gonna say I am dumb that I more dollar bills flying out the window, providing the world’s easiest breadcrumb trail. We were tired and hungry, even if we were soaking wet, we weren’t gonna stop until we got West.
I looked at the photo, I let it tell me where we were, that our characters had made it out of the car dealership, they were on the highway and the clouds looked like rain.
Image 3: A field in the sunshine.
We broke down, that’s the long and short of it. That dinky convertible’s transmission was burned up before we hit California. So we were out West all right, it was somewhere in the middle of Oregon that we stopped. Had to push that car into the fields, far enough away to where the cops would never find it. We slept in the tall reeds, and the sun came up that next day. And we had a cup of day old coffee and one stack of bills that would last as long as it took to get to ocean, where we could slip off a beach somewhere, where we could float forever.
I wasn’t thinking of the ending exactly, but an ending did come to me. Of course they could still get caught. We don’t know what will happen to them, but we know what they want, and at that point int he story, that’s all we get to know.
Your story doesn’t need to have a resolution in it’s ending. Real life often doesn’t have resolutions, just new days, and new chapters.
Take three of your images and make a story out of it.
Write the story using Google Docs, it will make the editing easier.
Add the three images to your Google Doc.
First draft is due on May 1st. The 2nd Draft is due on May 8th.
Strong Photography 19-20 