short, sweet and to-the-point

...however, once I read the other entries - and like other entrants who have said as much - I realised how far from world-shattering my own effort was! To be fair, I knew that before I entered, and I also knew why I knew it. It was a structural problem.

I knew it would be a challenge to fit a set-up, a plot of sorts & a denouement into 500 words - TV commercial writers do it, of course, developing scenarios with plots inside one minute - but they don't have to waste precious words on description. (One minute of spoken dialogue equals 125 words, if anyone's interested.)

It seems to me that a short story of this length almost has more in common with commercial-writing or stand-up comedy than with traditional fiction technique, in that you have no time or space for the niceties. I think it's a modern phenomenon - 100 years ago no one would have seen the point of a 500-word story, what wouldf it be for?

I found that many of the stories submitted to the competition shared this issue with mine. They built up beautifully, establishing the basis and then climbing up the plot (as it were) until the last twenty words or so, which were like a precipice - off which one sentence threw the whole thing down. In other words, they had throwaway resolutions. There was no flow down to the sea, only that cliff.

I remember this phenomenon from the days when I was reading a lot of books to my kids. There's a certain class of kids' books, usually older and maybe relying more on pictures or on its central premise, marked by a certain kind of laziness in the writing - presumably because at the time it was thought that you dind't have to be so careful as you were only entertaining the little ones, afert all. Children's writing is never like this any more; it has other problems, to be sure, but that woudl be for another post. The kind of book I'm talking about is where you find a final page with the words: "But it was all a dream."

"But it was all a dream" even became a catchphrase in our house for a kind of crap laziness of thought. In the end result it is like laziness because it's a not-following-through, and the reader feels cheated of the rationale for the story.

And, much as it pains me to say it, some of these stories - including mine - suffered from precisely this syndrome, though in our case it was caused, not by lack of imagination or an ungenerous spirit, but by having to make the whole thing with under 500 words. I even voted for one which I thought was badly marred by it, because I liked the writing and the set-up so much.

I knew it would be hard. (As the famous quote from GB Shaw goes: "Dear (so & so), Please forgive the long letter. I didn't have time to write a short one.") And I didn't have enough time to write my story in, only one evening. Once I'd done it I knew the story would need editing upwards to get it to make enough sense. And I couldn't find anything to cut.

So the whole thing was all very interesting, including looking at what was and wasn't working in the other stories. Well done to Maht for running this competition - AND with prizes! Ungenerosity is clearly not an issue for this guy. Rounds of applause all round.

Suddenly she woke up and saw the sun shining through her curtains. It had all been a dream.