First, as a mandatory assignment—to assess our writing skill in English during the last year of Bachelor (“Licence” in French universities)—our teacher asked us to compose a story (flash fiction) of no less than 1 000 words and no more than 1 100 words. It should take place on a farm where everything is done manually, and one third of the composition should be made up of dialogues!

In my story, entitled The Cornfield as an homage to John Constable, I drew some inspiration from a harvest scene in the TV series Lark Rise to Candleford, and from the description of a fire in Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist, Book III, Chapter 10, ‘The Flight of Sikes’.

Second, as an assignment in a workshop, each participant was required to write a short piece according to certain directives that others did not know. When reading aloud our pieces, the other participants should guess what was the outline given to us. Here was mine: “Farewell scene: A man in his fifties is in a hospital to say goodbye to an old lover, who is dying. They haven’t seen each other in more than twenty years. They broke up in bad terms. Somehow, he feels guilty about this, but he is too proud to admit it and say sorry.”

Would you try using your imagination and write a short piece according to these directives? If you’re interested in reading mine, here it is:

Illustration on top of this page: John Constable, The Cornfield, Copyright: National Gallery, London. https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/john-constable-the-cornfield