I am Kurt Stevens, the author of Capital Offense, which is currently being released 100% online, for free, at www.CapitalOffenseBook.com.
Every day this week we’re giving away a $10 Amazon.com gift card to the best Tweeted story. All five daily winners will be placed on my Facebook page at the end of the week for your votes, and the top voted winner will be the Grand Champion! The Grand Champ will take home an Amazon Kindle (or a $50 Amazon.com gift card).
After much consideration, I am pleased to announce that the winner of Day 1 – theme ESCAPE – of the Twitter Micro-Fiction Contest is:
“She thought she made it out in time. But, over the cubicle walls, he heard her fart.”
Congratulations to @BradPauquette.
You may recognize that Brad Pauquette is also the Director of Columbus Creative Cooperative. For that reason, I tried to find every excuse to choose someone else, but at the end of the day, I truly felt that he did the best job of creating a story about the theme “Escape” in a single Tweet. I convinced him to allow himself to be chosen, though I doubt he’ll accept the prize.
Congratulations, Brad! You deserve it.
Don’t forget, the contests continue all week, with a different theme each day. Today’s theme is “Death” and tomorrow’s theme is “Captivity.” Just be sure to include @ColumbusCoop and the hashtag #FFC in your tweet to be considered. You can enter as many times as you’d like, and everyone is eligible to participate, except the judge (me).
If you’d like to see all of the Twitter Micro-Stories that have been considered, you can visit this link or search “@columbuscoop #FFC” on Twitter.com.
What am I looking for? The challenge of flash fiction, whether it’s 100 characters or 1,000 words, is to quickly create character, plot and environment. In the case of 140 characters, it’s your job to carefully choose words that imply more than they’re saying.
The shortest story ever written is Ernest Hemmingway’s “For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.” He doesn’t spell out characters and a plot, but they’re all there. The reader is in a position to consider who placed the ad (ads don’t naturally occur)? Who’s baby? What happened to the baby? The story is specific enough to prompt all of these questions, but allows the reader to supply all of the rest from their own life experiences. That’s a beautiful thing.
For today’s contest, there were some great lines of prose that were submitted. I simply felt that most of them weren’t really stories. They didn’t paint a broader picture than what was literally in the sentence.
I felt that Brad’s, and a couple of others, truly created characters, plot and a sense of environment that the reader could take and extrapolate from. I’m also looking for stories that creatively adapt the theme, and don’t necessarily take the most obvious avenue with it. Brad’s story is definitely a creative adaptation of the theme of ESCAPE!
Keep the entries coming! Today is a new day.
And don’t forget to check out my book at www.CapitalOffenseBook.com. You can also find me on Twitter @CapOffense or on Facebook here. If you’d like to vote for the Grand Champion on Saturday, make sure to “Like” my Facebook page.
Until tomorrow! Keep writing!
