Fifty-word stories? Sounds easy, but HA! Challenge embraced; let the jotting and counting begin.
“Not tonight dear. One… too busy… two, three.”
Cloud of perpetual distraction.
“Sorry, what were you saying? Didn’t catch that. I was—”
“Yeah. I know,” he mumbles. “Counting. Scribbling.”
Relationship ends, but hey! Fifty words!
Judi MacKenzie is a writer who teaches yoga and, sometimes, meticulously counts words. She loves writing screenplays and is a reader for the Austin Film Festival.
Didn’t enter the ring for the competition, but rather more for a discourse with the future. The brain more of a sponge soaking up the spill to feed its thirst than a tool used cleaning up the mess left behind.
A challenge barely begun and certain to last only moments.
D. Andrew Bradley is a currently unemployed truck driver wasting time on the internet. He has no writing experience or education beyond what would be considered normal. He just found this quick mental release of blah-blah rather satisfying. Not sure of what will happen next, but back to work means less writing.
Blaine scratched his head as the monitor stared at him in mockery.
Reducing his word count to below the allowed limit was practically impossible.
After inappropriately utilizing inordinate-amounts-of-hyphens-and-caffeine, as if that would help, he submitted his work, confident that he would win something.
He didn’t.
Joey wasn’t interested in writing while at school but has been writing on his own in recent years, mostly to amuse himself. He has been published at The Story Shack and Needle In The Hay. He also likes roast cows.
Fifty words: the Swiss Cheese of storytelling.
Strategically placed holes actually hold it together. A dozen words to start a scene, fifteen to introduce a character or two. Then conflict and a hint of resolution with an open ending.
What happens next? What’s left out is what makes it work.
During the day, Gary Zenker creates marketing plans and ad copy. By night, he turns his attention to writing things people might actually WANT to read.