Short Story Reveals All About Author!!!

How to Write a Two-Page Story for a Fiction Writing Contest

1. After seeing an ad for a very short story contest in a local magazine, you call all your writer friends and beg them to enter, saying “You will be sure to win! And seeing as I found this contest for you, and the prize is two hundred dollars and publication, you can take me out to lunch.” You go on to explain to these friends that you haven’t eaten lunch out for a while because funds are low due to the divorce-thing, moving-out-thing, two-year-old kid thing. So they really have to enter.

2. Most of your friends will basically say, “Mmm-hmm, maybe I will enter,” but you know they won’t. You were just kind of playing/kvetching anyway. But your best friend says, “Say, you haven’t written in a long time, why don’t you enter?” And you think “Because I’m tired or my little angel/devil at home won’t let me or I have no time or my computer’s broken, or I haven’t written in a long time.” None of these excuses really hold up even inside your mind. Before you can formulate something worth breath, your best friend says, “This is a good thing. You’ve been all crazy with your divorce/moving/kid thing. You have to enter. We’ll do it together.” Your best friend takes your hand firmly. You can’t get out of this now.

3. You sit down on the ferry that night, on the way home from work, pull out a yellow legal pad, yank a pen out of the bottom of your bag, and take a deep breath. Nothing. Your mind is a complete blank. You look at the people around you, sitting reading the paper, or leaning forward, slightly hunched with their eyes closed. Still nothing. You close your own eyes.

4. Repeat Step 3, only in the morning.

5. Desperately, you try to hear your inner voice, your inner child, your inner god, your own Mark Twain, but there is nothing but the deafening roar of the resentful divorce-thing, stultifying work-thing, laughing-destroying angel/devil thing.

6. You pull out your notebook and pen on the ferry once again, but realize that this is a contest, so there is a deadline. Stressed, you try to recall every writer’s –block-busting exercise from every frizzy, brown-haired writing workshop mediator you ever met: from Write 100 Things You Did Today, to Write the First Ten Lines to Write the Last Ten Lines to Write a Dialog from Unconnected Words to…

7. On that ferry ride and the next and at lunch time, you’re really cookin’! You write pages and pages of lists, you’re getting ideas—or at least your pad is not empty anymore. And then you take a breath and look at what you wrote. You realize that when you read the List of Ten First Lines, you immediately know the last ten lines that go with them—and so will everyone else. The 100 Things You Did Today are not what anyone would want to read and your dialogs sound like dull echoes of “Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City”—or worse, “Betrayal” a TV sex thriller you fell asleep to in 1978.

8. After your kid goes to sleep, you call your friend who will enter this contest with you—the one who is sure to win, and take you out to lunch. “I’m working on a deadline for this article, and they’re going to pay me! Don’t you have anything old you can send?”

9. You hang up the phone. You know now you are a miserable failure. You feel a sob coming on... You lie in bed, and sob straight into the pillow. You sob until your stomach muscles cramp, until your voice is hoarse. You sob yourself to sleep.

10. You wake up about an hour before your kid will. A fraying red felt-tip pen and a doodle pad are on the floor next to you. You forget steps one through nine, your divorce, money, new apartment, kid, who you are. You write the first word that comes to mind and keep going.