Took me 3 hours to write a 300-word flash fiction piece

I've always thought writing was just a matter of sitting down and letting it flow. But last week I tried that timed flash fiction prompt from the '500 words in 20 minutes' challenge and I barely finished 200 words in an hour. Something about the time limit made me overthink every sentence, and I ended up deleting more than I kept. Has anyone else found that pressure actually makes them slower?

2 comments

2 Comments

felixw6823h ago

I hit 450 words in 12 minutes once on a train with a dying laptop battery, but zero time pressure lets me spiral into rewriting the same opening line twelve times. Maybe your brain treats a clock like a judge instead of a coach?

the_sarah21h ago

Oh totally, I once wrote a whole 800 word thing on a plane using the notes app with my thumb hovering over the "low battery" warning, and it came out nearly perfect, but give me a quiet Sunday afternoon with no stakes and I'll rewrite the same sentence like ten times until it's somehow worse than it started. It's like my brain sees an open schedule and thinks "oh great, now we have time to second-guess every comma and also question our life choices." That judge vs. coach thing really hits home, I feel like deadlines are the only thing that keep me from turning a simple paragraph into a three hour spiral of self-doubt (and probably some internet rabbit holes too). Honestly, maybe we all just need a little bit of that laptop battery panic to keep us honest.