The most important writing lesson I ever learned was not in a screenwriting class, but a fiction class. This was senior year of college. Most of us had already been accepted into grad school of some sort. We felt powerful, we felt talented, and most of all, we felt artistic. It was the advanced fiction workshop, and we did an entire round of workshops with everyone's best stories, their most advanced work, their most polished pieces. It was very technical and, most of all, very artistic. IE: They were boring pieces of pretentious crap. Now the teacher was either a genius OR was tired of our shit, and decided to give us a challenge. Flash fiction, he said. Write something as quickly as possible. Make it stupid. Make it not mean a thing, just be a quick little blast of words. And, of course, we all got stupid. Little one and two pages of prose without the barriers that it must be good. Little flashes of characters, little bits of scenarios. - iFunny
