My group's brief was:
Genre: Drama
Word: Strength
Action: Sewing
The short fiction I write is generally a) fanfic, so you can skip a whole bunch of world-building, b) quite long. I ramble (no shit), so I was already feeling a bit… stressed by the 100 word constraint and now it had to be dramatic and about sewing?!
But I’ve done a lot of applications/ marketing briefs which are constrained to less than 100 words, so I figured I’d do what I do there: write the whole thing, then ruthlessly chop the fat out, trying not to take any muscle with it, until it’s ≤100 words.
Here’s the final version of the story:
Cross-Stitch
She sits, head bowed, focusing on her rhythm: in… out… “After all,” he’s breezing,“it’s not like you were planning on doing anything else, hm?”
She frowns. “Sorry?”
“Well, with your life.”
It’s been an age since she’s felt the Pressure testing all her barriers.
“I spoke to your father,” he continues, butterfly-blithe; she doesn’t realise what’s happened until the stain starts spreading.
She blinks fast, barely hearing the next words. Meaningless, anyway; predictable. She stares at the blood from her finger blooming through the embroidery from where she’s stuck it, the strength of the next impulse overwhelming every barrier.
Whether or not you get through, you do get feedback from the judges, and you also get the chance to stick the story up on the user forum to get feedback while you’re waiting (the judgement only turned up today). So I took that chance and held my breath.
Both the forums and the judges were agreed on the main points: it’s poetic, but also super vague. They wanted the story rooted in something more solid. I can honestly see what they mean. I wrote a short story for a poetry audience, in short, and that was the fifth element (or constraint) I failed to take account of: who is this for?
So lesson learned. Definitely disappointed, but the bitterness has passed quickly. They have a redonkulous number of entries to parse, so it must be really tricky, and those other qualifying writers will have written for the right audience. But I now have a bunch of short stories I can read without judging them as competition, so I’ll get on that shortly, while trying to work out if I want to enter the somewhat less constrained flash fiction competition by the same people. And whether I would like to keep trying my hand at drabbles for the fun/ discipline of it.
