What is “Fifteen Blinks”?

Fifteen Blinks is a new series on Write Lara Write consisting of writing lessons and writing assignments. These assignments can be applied to poetry or short prose, fiction or nonfiction.

Why “Fifteen Blinks”?

The average person blinks 20–30 times per minute. However, when reading something particularly interesting, a person blinks only 3–5 times per minute. The idea behind Fifteen Blinks is that your finished piece (a “Fifteen Blinker”) should be interesting enough and short enough for a reader to read it in 3–5 minutes, blinking approximately 15 times. Rough guidelines? About 300–800 maximum words for prose, or fewer than 30 lines for poetry.

Participation

These lessons and exercises are for educational, non-profit use.

Writers—Feel free to publish any of your work that came from the exercises, because those pieces belong to you! If you include a piece on a blog, I’d love it if you’d include a link on that post back to the Fifteen Blinks post that inspired you, and I’d be even happier if you left a link in the comments of my blog to your work, so I can read it!

Educators—You are welcome to share these lessons with your students, but please do not copy or share them without including a link to a Fifteen Blinks page or the Write Lara Write homepage.

Buttons

Let people know you’re participating in Fifteen Blinks by choosing a button and copying its code (displayed below each image). Then paste the code to the bottom of your post or to your blog’s sidebar. When people click on the image, they will be taken to the latest Fifteen Blinks post.

<a href="http://tinyurl.com/15blinks"><img src="http://ow.ly/jDTkG" width="200" height="200"></a>

<a href="http://tinyurl.com/15blinks"><img src="http://ow.ly/jEbgP" width="200" height="200"></a>

<a href="http://tinyurl.com/15blinks"><img src="http://ow.ly/jDTxq"></a>

<a href="http://tinyurl.com/15blinks"><img src="http://ow.ly/jDU5c"></a>