![]() ![]() Now you're ready to write a 100-word story of your own! Make sure you enter our competition by submitting your story by here.ĭEADLINE FOR ENTRIES NOW EXTENDED FOR CHILDREN'S CATEGORIES-ENTER BY ***NOW CLOSED FOR ADULT ENTRIES*** Strip out superfluous words so that what you are left with is the brilliant, evocative essence of your story. Once your story is written, see what you can take out without changing the sense of it. Give them something to take away from your story. The characters must have moved on from where they were at the beginning. No matter how short, all stories need a sense of progression. You don’t need perfectly formed sentences. Shorten your sentencesīe creative with form. Think about how you can set the scene and convey emotion using single evocative words. ![]() Do away with speech attributions too, if it’s clear who is speaking. Speech allows characters to encapsulate storylines and infer meaning you may not have time for with exposition. Writing in the first person and the present tense also helps with economy of words. If necessary, others can be mentioned or alluded to. Focus on a single scene in a particular moment of time. Keep it simpleĪlthough you want to write a complete story, you do not have time for back-story or sub plots. Your beginning should take the reader straight to the heart of the story, introduce the main characters, establish the setting and raise a question that will be answered by the end. “Something nasty in the woodshed” or “ Skating on Thin Ice” alert the reader to a reveal or a disaster before you’ve even begun writing. When you’ve got a limited word count, a good title can start to tell the story. The following tips will help you consider how to make your 100 words speak volumes. Writing flash fiction is a process of choosing the right words and making the ones you have chosen sing for their supper. Thomas Jefferson famously said “the most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words where one will do.” Trying your hand at it can help even longer pieces of work become sparser and elegiac. But flash fiction is a brilliant exercise in restraint. To boil a whole story down to a few sentences is hard, especially if you are used to writing longer stories or even full-length novels. "The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words where one will do" Traditional jokes follow a similar format: a man walks into a bar, he says or does a few things and then there is a punch line. “Baby Shoes” illustrates how it is possible to do this with the utmost brevity. The story should have a beginning, middle and end and often finishes with a surprise or twist, which prompts the reader to reflect further. In flash fiction writers aim to tell an entire story in a few short paragraphs. It also requires you to trust yourself as a writer and to resist the temptation to over-explain. The challenge of writing a piece of flash fiction is to say enough to convey a story which resonates, while allowing the reader to infer further layers of meaning. The human brain is a miraculous thing, with endless capacity for filling in the gaps. The skill is in choosing the right words and allowing them to suggest far more than they say. The ones he came up with show that being a man (or woman) of few words doesn’t stop you from saying a great deal with them. Never worn.” His challenge was to move his audience with a few brief words. ![]() Legend has it Hemmingway won a bet with his six-word short story: “For sale: baby shoes. Want to try your hand at writing a 100-word story but don't know where to begin? Here's a quick guide to get you started ![]()
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