At some point this year Friday Fictioneers will be three years old. Pretty amazing to stay around this long. We’ve had vets leave and come back and a lot of newbies come and go as well, but the stories have always intriguing and thought-provoking. I guess that’s what makes us stay and write every week.

With my other online writing group, I set my writing goals for the year, to include participating in Friday Fictioneers, so I’ll be around as long as Friday Fictioneers is around. However, writing a story for Friday Fictioneers isn’t merely to check a box. Paring a story down to 100 words improves not only your writing skills but your editing/revising abilities as well.

Here’s an example. When I first started writing these 100-word stories, my first draft was typically 300-400 words, which took a lot of editing to get to 100 words as a coherent story. As I became more practiced, first draft began to drop in word count–200 words, 150 words, until now when a draft comes in at 105 or so words. Makes the editing easier and quicker, too. Plus doing these flash fiction stories has inspired me to participate in other flash fiction exercises with different word counts. Yep, I’m very versatile.

Another way I’ve used Friday Fictioneers story prompts is to hone my dialogue skills. I’ve written several stories, which consist solely of dialogue. Today is one of those exercises. The story is “Did I Tell You the One About My Talking Dog?” As usual, if you don’t see the link on the title in the line above, scroll to the top of the page, click on the Friday Fictioneers tab, then select the story from the drop-down list. It’ll be easy. After a purge of 2013 stories, it’ll be the only possibility there.