Juiced On Writing

Keeping to the Change This manifestos (see last post), I discovered this one. It’s free, so view the manifesto in your browser, or download it. Written by Rajesh Setty, the Mini Sagas manifesto incorporates photographs and a piece of writing work which the author calls Mini Sagas.

From Mini Sagas:
“A mini saga is a story told in exactly 50 words—not 49 or 51 but in exactly 50 words.

Benefit #1: Writing a mini saga expands your creativity. Constraints typically expand creativity or induce flight. When you have to put everything in 50 words, you have to ‘leave behind’ a lot. That’s where the creative juices start flowing.

Benefit #2: Writing a mini saga stretches your thinking. What will you write about? You have to think about topics that will fit in 50 words or squeeze them to fit in 50 words. That puts thinking on overdrive mode.

Benefit #3: Writing a mini saga enhances your discipline. Deciding what to write about, deciding what to leave behind and putting it in 50 words requires discipline throughout.”

Putting words to photographs is a technique used for my own crafting hobby, that of scrapbooking – where family photographs are enhanced with journaling to tell the whole story for future generations. In that, I tend to keep my own journaling to a minimum – as few words as possible, and normally sticking to the journalistic Who, What, Where, How, Why and Which.

However, here, with Setty’s Mini Sagas, he defines a word limit and uses it for creative inspiration. Let’s take that out further, and define it as a writing prompt and ideas to induce your own muse.

Writing Prompt:

1. Randomly choose a photograph out of a glossy magazine lying around in your home. (You can use all sorts of methods to ensure randomness, such as selecting a page number and going to that page). OR -
2. If you’re on the net, go to the interesting posts sections of a photopost service such as Flickr (Flickr has a page for interesting posts in the last seven days), or to websites such as news sites like the BBC – and choose the third image you see.
3. Print / Cut out the photograph and stick it into your writing notebook.
4. Write a Mini Saga about the photograph – 50 words describing the story, no less, no more.
5. Repeat regularly (daily?) – you may come up with some workable ideas for your fiction.

Link: Mini Sagas manifesto (Change This)

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