I like to write. One day I’d like to see writing as my full time career. That being said, I personally don’t think much of my abilities, but like anything, the more you try, the better you become. Or at least that is the hope.
I came across this challenge a few months back whilst indulging in a creative writing course on Udemy, credit to Trace Crawford for his fantastic course, and have dabbled with it once or twice since then. But I figured if I’m going to talk about my writing, I need some writing to talk about. So here we go, I’m going to try and make this a regular thing. The rules are as follows:
55 WORD SHORT STORY FICTION
The Task: To create a complete short story in exactly 55 words – no more, no less.
Why? It teaches you to focus tightly on the important action of a plot and improves your ability to express that action. The brevity required forces you to use words intelligently boosting your vocabulary.
What you MUST have:
- A setting – the story has to happen somewhere – in your mind, in the forest, in your neighbor’s house, in your garden – be sure to give the reader enough to be able to picture the setting for themselves.
- One or more characters – can be people, animals, inanimate objects, or anything else you can think of – whatever works for your story.
- Conflict – involving an event of some kind. Can include a fight, a chase, a conspiracy, even silence. Remember that all story revolves around some sort of conflict.
- Resolution – a solution that wraps up the story, giving the reader a good takeaway. In 55 words stories, this is often some sort of a “twist.”
The Rules:
- Hyphenated words count as two words.
- Contractions count as one word.
- Abbreviations (Dr.) and shortened forms (‘em for them) count as one word.
- Acronyms (NATO, SCUBA, TMI) count as one word.
- The title is not part of the 55 words, but MAY NOT exceed seven words.
- Numbers count as one word.
- Punctuation marks are not a part of the word count.
Begin by noting down some ideas. Write without editing. Avoid the use of a / an / the as fillers.
When your story is ready, start chipping away the extra words to sculpt your story. Edit to 55 words exactly.
Now, my plan is to use a random number generator to pick one of the 365 Creative Writing Prompts found Here. At the end of a completed story, I select the prompt for the next one. It most definitely won’t be a daily occurrence, but with a bit of luck, it might get the creative cogs whirling. So let’s begin… we are starting with number… 172…
172. Crossword Puzzle: Open up the newspaper or find a crossword puzzle online and choose one of the clues to use as inspiration for your writing.
Right.