The goal of FiftyWordStories.com is to post one new, original fifty-word story every day for a year. I started posting stories on Sunday, February 22, 2009.
A fifty-word story is a piece of fiction written in exactly fifty words. As with any other form of fiction, a fifty-word story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Fifty-word stories should have a plot and character development, and generally have a twist and/or a climax, like any other story. The difference, of course, is the word limit. Every fifty-word story must have exactly fifty words, not including the title. That doesn’t mean “roughly” fifty words; it doesn’t mean “as close to fifty words as possible”; it doesn’t mean fifty words or fewer. It means exactly fifty words.
It’s a fun medium to write in, and really forces you to choose your words wisely, edit your writing closely, and distil your story to its vital components. You can’t waste any words, and there’s no room for filler.
To submit your fifty-word stories for consideration for Guest Writer Mondays, see the Submissions page.
For other kinds of writing, blogs, and videos, see my website at www.thephatbunny.net.
Hi,
Great site! For close to a year, I’ve been meaning to register the domain name 50wordstories.com. Looks like you beat me to it! (Don’t worry, I won’t try to steal it from you or anything…)
I had started building a community site based around 50-word stories, because I had so much fun writing a bunch of those on the Penny-Arcade.com forum, “Writer’s Block” (I’m mentioning this in case you’re familiar with that particular thread… This is me waving Hi! at you if you contributed there some months ago…)
My plan is to have a site similar to the now-defunct Ficlets.com, but based around the 50-word story concept. Anyone could create an account and post a story, and visitors could search the archives, and possibly write sequels or prequels to existing stories. Naturally, comments on stories would also be encouraged.
Anyway, this site is still a ways off, but if you like, I’ll notify you when (if?) the site goes online.
Posted by Sylvain Schmidt on March 17th, 2009.
The one-story-a-day thing started on the 22nd of February, but there are posts before that. What’s the dealio?
Posted by danineteen on August 3rd, 2009.