Incredibly, three months has come and gone since I entered my first Writers Weekly 24-Hour Short Story Contest, which makes it time for another one. Today, I wrote a short story for the Spring 2008 contest, and I’m happier with it than the story I produced the last time round.
I love the idea of this forced creativity, having to use a prompt to develop a short story all within a short time – about 12 hours for me, due to time zone differences (unless I could get up in the middle of the night to see the contest details and prompt arrive). I work better under pressure and almost wish they’d put on a 24-hour contest every week – my productivity would definitely improve!
In any case, I wanted to make some notes about how my approach was different next time. I’m already looking forward to the Summer contest in another three months, but I want to make sure I’m improving. So what I think I did better this time is:
- I read the topic, then went about the beginning of my day – eating breakfast, having a shower – with the topic at the back of my mind. I often have good ideas in the shower so I kept moving my thinking back to the writing prompt when it strayed to other thoughts.
- I brainstormed a little on paper. I extracted the main elements of the topic (the contest doesn’t insist that you use every element as they have it – just that it’s obvious your story was written in response to that prompt). Looking back on my brainstorming scribbles now, I can see I did use a few of the ideas I generated here.
- I told my husband what the topic was and he gave me a few of his immediate ideas. He’s very creative and imaginative, and the ideas he gave me weren’t really anywhere down my alley, but something he said stuck and gave me a slightly sinister tone for the story.
- Then I wrote the first draft all in one hit. This was relatively easy, as there was a 1000 word limit, plus my husband was threatening to turn the power off so he could do some electrical work, so I knew I had a physical time limit. I printed out the draft just before he got to the switchboard.
- For the very first time, I used a suggestion I read in one of Hope Clark’s Funds for Writers newsletters a long time ago – to the mechanical voice of ReadPlease to read my story aloud to me. This free software is pretty neat. It’s developed enough to include pauses for commas and something like normal sentence intonation, so you can really pick up when the rhythm of a sentence is wrong or words don’t fit together smoothly.
- And finally, because I’d come up just over the 1000 word limit, I edited carefully to eliminate a few unnecessary adjectives, adverbs and other redundancies.
The interesting thing will be to see if I still like this story tomorrow. I didn’t last time round – that’s the Australian time zone disadvantage of not being able to sleep on your story like the American contest entrants can. In any case, I’ve had an interesting day with it and I look forward to reading some of the winning results.
