50 word short story

His appology dripped from her fingernails and three severe red lines marked his cheek bone to his chin. His despondant gaze returned back over the tops of his hands and he looked out upon two naked lights; one dull and faded, the other once strong, now broken.

The writing competition hs a 50 word limit. It is to be a short story of any genre you like. The deadline is July 22nd and you can win £1000 for our school! Please get involved and bring in your entries to our wednesday meets!

Super low motion

Writing in great detail is often a tricky thing to do. This is in part because it requires imagining something in incredible detail, and partly the realisation that commenting on each of the tiny details builds up tension, suspense and drama. However it should be used carefully otherwise the overall plot will progress too slowly. The task this week is to attempt a very precise coverage of a slow motion film; I have written one up to this video as a style model. I find a slow motion video works very well for this task.

Sharp nose and rectangular forehead looks passively off screen, seemingly unsuspecting of an incoming projectile but surely watching it being propelled just out of shot. Yet despite his apparent composure, he clenches up his face as his instinctive defense mechanisms take hold of his muscles. Lips purse to resist entry of the incoming, nose seems to crinkle away, cheeks and eyes tense up. His breath is held. The projectile finally at it's point of destination; A water-ballon full to bursting. It's rubber skin giggling ripples as it flys through the air, water whiping from it's surface. His whole head tilts forward bracing for impact to save his nose and neck muscles from the weight of the water. As the ballon presses against his face, it's giggles become a great belly laugh and the ripples become waves that role obnoxiously around the man's cheeks, mocking his meagre attempt at resistance. It wraps great arms around his head, pulling his face into the cold folds of it's hilarity, stretching and reaching all around before snapping. It's laughter errupts into violent anger and the rubber peels back to reveal the crushing weight of it's innards. The explosion throws the man backwards amongst a million crystals that are flung out like the radiation of a dying star. As the crystals become rain and fall away, his breath is released and once again he can draw breath.

You can choose any subject but it should be a moment of a story worthy of a slow motion account, an emotional moment, a plot twist, someone in love or pain or a moment of catastrophe. You can try any slow motion video, or write your own acount.

Travel journal

Travel journals are the stories of people in interesting places. They have become a bit cliched (predictable) because there was a period where so many people just wrote about the mountains, the weather and the food - basically the things that we would like to see lacking in a holiday in England. Travel journals become so all encompasing (and many guides still are) that they take away the excitement of being somewhere new because you already experienced it vicariously through the guide...
Modern writers now have to make their stories very specific - writing about something that isn't mountains and sunshine and everything else; but a specific music event, a particular meal beside the beach, spotting animals, a discussion of what the buildings look like, conversations they had or the place's history. Travel writing has become incredibly unique, narrow and imaginative whilst still being a true and persuasive account.
Read the start of Paul Carr's current article for The Guardian in which he opens describing how a hotel robs him of money, to then retell a story in which he finds himself locked outside of his hotel room - naked. We hardly find anything out about where he is but his stories make us want to go there.

Travel writing has evolved into something humoured and interesting, it's story telling whilst also drip feeding facts about the area without just listing them off (we know for instance the price of his hotel room, but because it is snook into the story and not just fired off as another fact you should know).

Your task this week is to think of  holiday and a particular moment that made it exciting, or a huge failure. Describe this in detail building tension whilst attempting to be informative too. This description of a single event might be all a reader needs to be convinced to go to or avoid your destination - and they will want to experience everything else for themselves and be surprised.

Acronym

Listen carefully to this song;



The initial letter of the lyrics all make up the word FEAR (eg for every-man a religion. Interestingly, the lyrics are all quite metaphorical and seem to be messages about life or morals. The example suggests that beliefs are individual and because of that, indisputable. They could each be used as proverbs. This is one of my favourite songs because of it's uniqueness. Some of my favourite lines are:

> Free expression as revolution
> For each a road

Your task is to read the lyrics online, then choose your own four or five letter word to use as an acronym for metaphors or your own proverbs. You should choose a powerful word like 'free', 'love', 'hate' etc. You should have a dictionary close by to help choose words for each letter of your word and see if you can come up with interesting sentences. Hopefully, you'll find this task very rewarding when you come across a proverb that strikes a chord with you.

Remember, if you start your own blog and post online I will give some feedback and hopefully others will too.

-3- Joseph Wright of Derby

Click for a much larger size

A travelling scientist is shown demonstrating the effects of a vacuum by withdrawing air from a flask containing a white cockatoo, though common birds like sparrows would normally have been used. Air pumps were developed in the 17th century and were relatively familiar by Wright's day. The artist's subject is not scientific invention, but a human drama in a night-time setting.

The bird will die if the demonstrator continues to deprive it of oxygen, and Wright leaves us in doubt as to whether or not the cockatoo will be reprieved. The painting reveals a wide range of individual reactions, from the frightened children, through the reflective philosopher, the excited interest of the youth on the left, to the indifferent young lovers concerned only with each other.

The figures are dramatically lit by a single candle, while in the window the moon appears. On the table in front of the candle is a glass containing a skull.


---Task---
Use this image as inspiration for your own short article. It might be a science journal entry, cold and observant over the experiment; or a diary entry from one of the observers; or a third person narrative of the event. You don't need to compose plot and twists, just explore feelings, describe the atmosphere, and create tension and mood.

-2- Writing with tension and mystery

HG Wells - The Red Room

This Gothic tale of supernatural paranoia places the protagonist in a dare with some mysterious, and sometimes disfigured people. His repetition demonstrates his resolve; that nothing can scare him and that there is no such thing as ghosts. Wells uses long sentences to exhaust the reader (by making your unconscious breathless), personification and alliteration to create a sinister tone. Although many students do not feel the exhilaration of fear that this text may once have held, few miss the author's ability to create tension, mystery and intrigue.

Task; read The Red Room linked above. Look out for his use of personification, similes ("darkness closed upon me like the shutting of an eye") and sentence length.

Inspiration;

Stephen’s hand touched the cold metal the of basement handle. The bumps on his skin were erupting into pinpricks trying to burst through; goosebumps so terrible they hurt. The hairs on his arm stood, reaching back as if trying to pull him from the door but again, the heavy breathing, muted behind the plasterwall, slithered from the door crack, compelling him forward. The cold of the metal felt burning hot against his sweaty palm. He twisted it. It felt awkward, turning his wrist around further than it wanted too, turning turning turning until the catch burst off the door frame and his skin jump off his muscles. He tried to relax knowing that his fear was destroying his reason, but the heavy breathing had stopped. His presence wasn’t a secret anymore but still, he had to investigate. He opened the door a crack and a slither of light penetrated down the stairs to a few feet beyond the bottom step. He slid one arm through to the light catch and pulled it back through the slither, keeping an eye at all times on the 10feet of a six inch wide line he could see and tugged the wire. The light didn’t click. The more he tugged, the greater the angle the wire was lifter to, back into the hall. He pulled again and the switch resisted until it popped and fell limply from the ceiling. It was designed to be tugged down. With the pop however, came a grunt from below and he pulled back the door. His breath was like a tornado, or his ears were like radars honed-in to even the silent movement of air particles. Everything seem to be amplified to blood bubbling volumes.

Task; Continue the introduction above for between 200 and 300 words and attempt to emulate Wells' mystery.

Deadline: There is no deadline for submissions to this artifact.

-1- Fear of the Dark

This is an example post which you may choose to submit to. You will find the inspiration artifacts here with a comment below. The comment is my own which links to my own article following this theme (in truth, the work was written before the artifact but it serves it's purpose).



In future, there will be Advice posts to help you get started with this peice. But for starters, you should decide on Purpose (what do you want to achieve in your article?), Audience (Are you going to design it for a specific group?) and Mode (Will you produce a diary entry? A short story? A magazine article?).

Deadline: This is no deadline for article submissions.