$3000.00 Short Story contest

Mary

My Drawing of Monet
Hey writer's, here are the details ~ good luck to everyone!!

Mary (no garden, no lamb) :scn:

The 10th Annual Writer's Digest Short Short Story Competition is accepting entries! We're looking for fiction that's bold, brilliant ... but brief. Send us your best in 1,500 words or less. But don't be too long about it—the deadline is December 1, 2009.

The Grand-Prize winner will receive $3,000 (that's $2—or more—per word).
For guidelines, prizes and to enter online, click here.


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Plus, the 1st- through 25th-place manuscripts will be printed in the 10th Annual Writer's Digest Short Short Story Competition Collection. Click here to learn more about this special collection and to reserve
your copy today.
 

Mark Armstrong

Veteran Member
Some links:

Short Short Contest

Writer's Digest's other competitions

The short short category of stories flourished in the early to mid part of the last century, both in daily newspapers and in slick magazines, such as Collier's.

I've been enjoying the Daily Short Story series of short shorts that appeared in the Milwaukee Journal back in the 1930s. the series may have appeared in later decades as well, but I haven't worked my way through the 1930s yet. You can find a couple hundred or so of those stories by doing a search for "Daily Short Story" in Google's News Archive:

http://www.google.com/archivesearch...rc=milwaukee+journal&as_price=p0&as_scoring=a

You can find a lot more by using a blank search field for "find results," and with dates selected, by which you can browse the entire issue of just about any date.

Those old short shorts generally were structured to lead up to a twist ending (Aristotelean peripeteia--discovery and reversal, as described in Aristotle's Poetics). The best of the Daily Short Stories that I've found in the Milwaukee Journal so far has been "Almost Homecoming" by Douglas Whitney in the February 4, 1938 issue. The last two paragraphs of that story lift it above the quality of the typical short shorts that the paper would run. A more typical short short would simply resolve at the twist ending, and not provide a look at the impact that the twist had on the characters. A link to "Almost Homecoming":

http://news.google.com/newspapers?i...EAAAAIBAJ&pg=4083,781774&dq=almost-homecoming
 

Mark Armstrong

Veteran Member
A little more about short short stories.

I first became interested in short shorts some years ago when I came across Maren Elwood's book Write the Short Short (The Writer, 1947). Also, at about the same time, I was reading Walter S. Campbell's book Writing Magazine Fiction (Doubleday, 1940) which has a chapter on the short short story.

Campbell says of short shorts:

The fact is that the short short story, running to from one thousand to fifteen or two thousand words, must contain all the ingredients of a regular short story of five or six thousand words. In addition it must have a surprise twist at the end and a suitable idea to begin with. This explains why really successful authors seldom write short shorts. The short short story is more trouble and brings in less money. A pulp writer can earn only fifteen or twenty dollars with his short short, whereas the same idea might be used in a regular short story and earn two or three times that money. In the slick markets, also, the best magazines pay only three or four hundred dollars for a short short story but reward authors of longer yarns two or three times as well. (Writing Magazine Fiction, page 166)

Elwood, in her book, goes down the line refuting everything Campbell says in the quote I provided.

Personally, I like short shorts if they are well written. Unfortunately, most are (or were) not. The short short category seems to attract beginning writers who lack the confidence to tackle longer forms of fiction. But, I think it is a wonderful category, to be tackled much as if one were writing a poem or an anecdote.

Here are some links to some more short shorts in a format easier to read than the microfilm archived stories I linked to in the previous post:

"Footprints" by C.K.M. Scanlon

"Boxed Death" by C.K.M. Scanlon

"License to Hell" by John L. Benton

"No Blood" by John L. Benton

"Rats Are Smart" by Robert Wallace

"The Pipe of Death" by Charles B. Stilson

"The Deadly Circle" by Charles J. Sullivan

"The Waltz" by Morris W. Gowen

"Men of Honor" by Will Garth
 

Laurane

Canadian Loonie
Wow.....Sat.....

do you ever have bad dreams??? Do you ever sleep??? What do you take to develop your imagination???

Can't you just write a nice gentle love story??? :spns:
 

Satanta

Stone Cold Crazy
_______________
do you ever have bad dreams??? Do you ever sleep??? What do you take to develop your imagination???

Can't you just write a nice gentle love story??? :spns:

I only have bad dreams about eality-the other stuff is a lambs rest.

I don't know-try years of beating, mental torture and health issues maybe.

Sure-but what's the fun in that? Besides-just view them as parables to reality-painful love stories. ;)
 

MaureenO

Another Infidel
I only have bad dreams about eality-the other stuff is a lambs rest.

I don't know-try years of beating, mental torture and health issues maybe.

Sure-but what's the fun in that? Besides-just view them as parables to reality-painful love stories. ;)

I have one that even you might like, Sat! Let me dig it up and I'll post it separately, it's called "Ride the Breezes."

Mo :rs:
 
make $240,000 from $300 in a month?
It is a true story. Chen Likui, a chinese teacher made $247,210 in a month just from a $300 deposit. He traded GBP/JPY. He was very strict about limit orders and not greedy. He considered a 10% profit as a good trade. Any body has ideas how to do it?
 
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