Write A 50 Word Short Story

[penrivers]

Interesting read -- thanks for posting the link.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

Inded was a good lesson je je , this is the only one line post I know from you Ruth. Greetings from México.

[Lyander0012]

I am horrible with short fiction, but here's a shot at it:

 

"The sun burned away the droplets of rain that had formed on my windowsill, and as it did, it brought with it memories of a bygone time.Your hair's scent still lingers. Your perfume has long since faded.

 

Yet you still lie here by my side, smiling in your sleep."

[hermanlab]

There came a boy from down the lane, his name was Harry Grey. A lively chap

who made me laugh until the war years came. Now it's I who walk the lanes

between the crosses row on row, a rose in hand to lay beside his name.

 

Merrie (aka Myn)

Outstanding short story. It says a lot with very little. It reminds me of grandfather's 17 year old friend who never came home from the war. Until he died, my grandfather still kept saying "if only I knew what became of Paulie...." They never did find out what became of him. I still have his picture.

[F104]

I have a story. However, it's 5 words heavy, and...well...I think it might have potential for expansion: I'm reluctant to release it into the wild.

[Lyander0012]

I have a story. However, it's 5 words heavy, and...well...I think it might have potential for expansion: I'm reluctant to release it into the wild.

You never know until you try! Besides, the whole point if threads like these are for people to show there stuff and get good feedback.

[F104]

You never know until you try! Besides, the whole point if threads like these are for people to show there stuff and get good feedback.

 

Master Yoda taught me to do. Or do not. There is no 'try.'

 

And I'm pretty sure I did--write something passable almost within the 50 word limit, that is. That's the problem: it's a very condensed version of an idea I think has potential for expansion into a commercially viable short story, maybe something longer. My concern is that posting it here might compromise, or at least complicate, copyright protection. I have no concerns about anyone I've encountered here making free with my IP, but who knows what eyes beyond those of the membership are looking around? I'd hate for some clown in the NSA to make off with my idea.

 

That aside, the feedback would be most welcome. Hammering this down to (near) fifty words was rather challenging. I've participated in Flash fiction challenges where the limit was 300 words before, and rather enjoyed it. On this I rather missed the additional 250 words.

Edited October 25, 2013 by F104

[Lyander0012]

Then by all means, please post the full, non-condensed version on here. I, for one, would very much like to hear it.

[Pickwick]

Diary 1917.

 

I watched him reach for a blade of grass. Cupping it between his thumbs to form a reed. Blew between them, the sound of Crow. Memories of Boyhood in the long green grass, Mother hanging laundry to dry. Seen through a Sniper's telescope, Youth's dreams were now lost forever.

[F104]

Then by all means, please post the full, non-condensed version on here. I, for one, would very much like to hear it.

 

Your interest and encouragement are very much appreciated. I'd love to post the full-up product, but it doesn't exist, yet. The idea has been floating around in my head in a very vague way for some time. Large areas of diffuse, amorphous story stuff, and a few denser areas amounting to actual scenes. Large-scale structure was largely absent. One of those more developed scenes was the one I wrote, and even it doesn't exist, outside my mind, in any other form than the condensed.

 

A few pages of manuscript notes do exist, however: once I started thinking about it to produce the fifty-worder (okay, the fifty-five-worder), more of the amorphous story-stuff started to condense. It might have the makings of a novella, or even a novel, at this point.

 

All that said, I still haven't ruled out posting the fifty (five) worder.

[Llewro]

Chilling, Pickwick.

[F104]

Here's a question that occurred to me while pondering this whole story business:

 

Who holds the copyright to our posts here? Does it remain with with each of us for our own posts, or do all posts become the property of FPN?

[Lyander0012]

Here's a question that occurred to me while pondering this whole story business:

 

Who holds the copyright to our posts here? Does it remain with with each of us for our own posts, or do all posts become the property of FPN?

 

Haha, I've been frequenting forums for a while now, and this question's been haunting me for ages. I guess it's quite a bit more relevant now that this is regarding a thread where people publish their own short fiction and whatnot, free for anyone and everyone to examine at their own leisure (provided there's a 'net connection handy, that is).

 

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, your intellectual property is still your own; you merely choose to display it here alongside the material of other people. Should anyone rip off your story and claim it as their own, despite there being timestamps and whatnot on this site, then I sincerely doubt you'd be powerless to stop them or anything. Also, I don't think the FPN would be, to put it bluntly, ballsy enough to scam one of its members that way.

 

I guess that makes sense?

 

 

Kevin

[F104]

 

Haha, I've been frequenting forums for a while now, and this question's been haunting me for ages. I guess it's quite a bit more relevant now that this is regarding a thread where people publish their own short fiction and whatnot, free for anyone and everyone to examine at their own leisure (provided there's a 'net connection handy, that is).

 

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, your intellectual property is still your own; you merely choose to display it here alongside the material of other people. Should anyone rip off your story and claim it as their own, despite there being timestamps and whatnot on this site, then I sincerely doubt you'd be powerless to stop them or anything. Also, I don't think the FPN would be, to put it bluntly, ballsy enough to scam one of its members that way.

 

I guess that makes sense?

 

 

Kevin

 

 

It seems pretty sensible to me. I wouldn't for a minute think FPN would try to scam any of us. However, I can imagine that for simple purposes of legal protection, in order to take action to properly administer and police the site--to clean up contentious, dubious or otherwise undesirable posts--it might be necessary for FPN to assert copyright to our "submissions." But that's only speculation on my part. Could be it's one of those posts-don't-represent-the-views-and-opinions-of-FPN-and-are-solely-the-responsibility-of-their-authors-while-we-reserve-the-right-to-give-them-the-boot-anyway situations. Again, pure speculation.

[Lyander0012]

Hey, speculation is where most of the fun on forums such as these start! If anything, I've found that it keeps the mind from idling too much.

 

Anyway, that's an idea not merely for the FPN, but for forums in general. Much as people accustomed to working on theses are wont to do (ugh, my brain's definitely stuck in that place right now), anyone making use of information originally belonging to another ought to have the common decency to give credit where credit is due.

 

The only difficulty I can see is that, given the nature of online forums nowadays, there is likely to be a lot of finger-pointing and "gimme"-ing involved in claiming ideas for oneself. It'll probably all degenerate into a steaming mess if a forum had to make a formal proclamation or alteration in its guidelines to implement all this, so I'm just hoping common sense wins out in the end with regard to things the like of copyright and whatnot..

 

Anyway, so as to not throw this thread too far off track:

[Cracks spread across his withered, pale skin, blood black as a sunless void flowing through. He was crying.

 

Fear shone brightly on the young woman's face, but only for an instant; in a voice elated and shaking with thrill, she screamed:

“I knew it!”

 

The old man was devastated.]

[inkstainedruth]

 

Master Yoda taught me to do. Or do not. There is no 'try.'

 

And I'm pretty sure I did--write something passable almost within the 50 word limit, that is. That's the problem: it's a very condensed version of an idea I think has potential for expansion into a commercially viable short story, maybe something longer. My concern is that posting it here might compromise, or at least complicate, copyright protection. I have no concerns about anyone I've encountered here making free with my IP, but who knows what eyes beyond those of the membership are looking around? I'd hate for some clown in the NSA to make off with my idea.

 

That aside, the feedback would be most welcome. Hammering this down to (near) fifty words was rather challenging. I've participated in Flash fiction challenges where the limit was 300 words before, and rather enjoyed it. On this I rather missed the additional 250 words.

That's been my problem as well. A lot of the stuff I've posted on this thread were actually distilled down from what might eventually become a novel (but at the moment is still a bunch of partially connected vignettes and episodes).

And as an aside to penrivers, yeah, well, I do tend to get a little, well, verbose....

I blame my mother. She said that the children of talkers do one of two things: compete or withdraw. And I competed....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[F104]

Lyander0012, Inkstainedruth: having read your posts and given it a bit more thought, I've decided to be bold and post my snippet. It's four words over (a final pass earlier resulted in minor tweaks and a saved word). If I were to title it, I suppose, at a pinch, it could be called "Beyond the Trees." Without further ado:

 

Vlad thrust at his foe.
Its chitinous breast shattered like brittle glass. It clutched at his sword.
Fluid oozed from its beak. It shrieked; it died.
The sun, swollen, age-reddened, sank below the horizon.
Fangs bared, Vlad—voivode, Dracula--roared.
“Even you, I will outlive!”
His prize, the starship, gleamed in the twilight.

Edited October 28, 2013 by F104

[inkstainedruth]

Haha, I've been frequenting forums for a while now, and this question's been haunting me for ages. I guess it's quite a bit more relevant now that this is regarding a thread where people publish their own short fiction and whatnot, free for anyone and everyone to examine at their own leisure (provided there's a 'net connection handy, that is).

 

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, your intellectual property is still your own; you merely choose to display it here alongside the material of other people. Should anyone rip off your story and claim it as their own, despite there being timestamps and whatnot on this site, then I sincerely doubt you'd be powerless to stop them or anything. Also, I don't think the FPN would be, to put it bluntly, ballsy enough to scam one of its members that way.

 

I guess that makes sense?

 

 

Kevin

Weird synchronicity: I was just talking on the phone with a friend of mine about 20 minutes before reading this part of this thread.

She was complaining that people have used photographs (that she's taken and put up online) as the basis for their own artwork (other media) without acknowledgment or permission, so now she doesn't upload photos of people anymore. And that a guy published a poem written by a mutual friend of ours and posted to his website in a newsletter without permission (in that case, the poet kinda went ballistic, and there was apparently a rapid reshuffling of the online content of the newsletter. When I heard that I was like "Wow, what was that guy (the newsletter editor) *thinking* -- was he like under a rock during the whole "But honestly, Monica" brouhaha from a couple of years ago (in which some woman publishing a little magazine out of her kitchen cribbed an article from a COPYRIGHTED website).

I think for the stuff I've personally posted on this thread, I'm not too concerned. The pieces are all pared-down from longer pieces that are still mostly in my head. But it is something to think about. And when I have written stuff for publication (even a local newsletter), I didn't use the artwork straight off the websites where I found them (the originals were all medieval and Renaissance works -- paintings, manuscript illuminations, etc.). I redrew *everything* as black and white line drawings (no, I *didn't use an FP for them, I used Uniball black medium line rollerball pens -- I wasn't really using FPs for anything but my daily journal back then). And I credited where I found all the works (one carving was in the Louvre on their website) in the footnotes and bibliography (it was an article about the "Knitting Madonnas" and similar types of images). Because even if the artwork is no longer protected by copyright, the books and websites where I found the images almost certainly were. And the newsletter *was* going to be in online (as well as hard copy) format. And I think I had to sign a release form as well.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[F104]

What happened to the "edit" button?

[Lyander0012]

What happened to the "edit" button?

 

From what I've noticed, it disappears after a while depending on how many follow-up posts there are. I could be wrong, but I noticed the same thing when I wanted to make a few changes to this review I posted not too long ago.

 

By the way, I only just managed to read the story you'd posted. It's beautiful, but to be perfectly honest, I think there's a bit too much thinking going into it. While I did enjoy reading it (and playing things out in my headspace), it didn't feel all that accessible. That aside, chitinous creatures and Dracula? You really ought to expand on that idea!

 

 

Weird synchronicity: I was just talking on the phone with a friend of mine about 20 minutes before reading this part of this thread.

She was complaining that people have used photographs (that she's taken and put up online) as the basis for their own artwork (other media) without acknowledgment or permission, so now she doesn't upload photos of people anymore. And that a guy published a poem written by a mutual friend of ours and posted to his website in a newsletter without permission (in that case, the poet kinda went ballistic, and there was apparently a rapid reshuffling of the online content of the newsletter. When I heard that I was like "Wow, what was that guy (the newsletter editor) *thinking* -- was he like under a rock during the whole "But honestly, Monica" brouhaha from a couple of years ago (in which some woman publishing a little magazine out of her kitchen cribbed an article from a COPYRIGHTED website).

I think for the stuff I've personally posted on this thread, I'm not too concerned. The pieces are all pared-down from longer pieces that are still mostly in my head. But it is something to think about. And when I have written stuff for publication (even a local newsletter), I didn't use the artwork straight off the websites where I found them (the originals were all medieval and Renaissance works -- paintings, manuscript illuminations, etc.). I redrew *everything* as black and white line drawings (no, I *didn't use an FP for them, I used Uniball black medium line rollerball pens -- I wasn't really using FPs for anything but my daily journal back then). And I credited where I found all the works (one carving was in the Louvre on their website) in the footnotes and bibliography (it was an article about the "Knitting Madonnas" and similar types of images). Because even if the artwork is no longer protected by copyright, the books and websites where I found the images almost certainly were. And the newsletter *was* going to be in online (as well as hard copy) format. And I think I had to sign a release form as well.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 

Haha, you'd be surprised at how often things like that seem to happen. Either it really is nothing more than a string of coincidences, or there's something behind the theory of synchronicity after all. Like, I recall several instances when, immediately after I come up with an idea for a story or 9gag post (hey, I have to kill time on my mobile somehow ), I come across a recently written text or post that almost exactly mirrors my idea.

 

That aside, I'm much the same as you in that the vast (and I mean vast) majority of what I've been writing on random sheaves of paper and on my laptop are mostly just random odds and ends that I honestly wouldn't mind someone else using. Of course, I'm still hoping that I might one day be able to piece them all together or expand upon each of them so as to not put all the hours I've spent writing so far to waste

 

Speaking of... holy Fonzies, it's NaNoWriMo soon. First time signing up, and I'm insanely nervous

 

 

Cheers!

 

Kevin

[JulianN]

I thought I would give this a go. Unfortunately, I could only stretch it to 37 words.

 

"John hasn't been the same since he was rescued from that island," said Steve.

"I know. I think he has gone insane," said Adam.

"Agreed," said Steve.

"Agreed," said Adam.

"Get, out, of, my, HEAD!" Said John.

 

--Julian Nell--

 

Thanks for reading.