To see four excellent examples of a 100 word story, hop on over to the publisher’s site now. Or pick up the book from Amazon or request it from your local indie bookstore.
Today we continue our look at short stories as not-mini-novels and play with them in ways you can only play with short stories!
The Prompt
Write a story completely in dialogue
It’s probably best to keep this to two characters because it’s harder to have more than two characters, without attribution.
I want you to keep it straight in our heads, who’s talking, simply by the way they talk.
A guy who works on Wall St should sound different from a farmer from a rural area.
Don’t forget to leave a comment and tell us what you wrote today!
Complete. My story was about a married couple stuck in a life raft together, with dwindling supplies and facing death. Originally I had one character be coy and the other more direct. Then they started arguing and their mannerisms started to switch. I found myself having them address each other by name a few times just so I could keep myself straight!
Fun prompt, thank you.
Yeah, that sounds like something that would have to happen in this scenario.
Nice, David! I put my characters in a similar pressure cooker–a pair of grown up siblings taking a walk in the woods and getting lost. (Hm–Hansel and Gretel, is that you, ish?) The brother is refusing to talk about all the things she wants to address, and she keeps seeing something disconcerting through the trees. I found that telling the story through dialogue alone put the focus much more on the characters, rather than their situation.