I've wanted to take on the challenge of writing a one hundred word story for a few years now and recently, I saw in the Reader's Digest Australia magazine that their 100 Word Story Competition is on again. The prize for the overall winner is $1000 and since I have taken my car to the mechanic and my teeth to the dentist both in the same week, I decided that now is well and truly the time to enter. I had thought that the challenge was to write a story of 100 words or less, but it turns out that it must be exactly 100 words. After adding and taking away words half a dozen times, here's what I came up with:
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She sits in front of the cake, eyes gleaming, totally present in this moment.
Her family gathers around her, smiling, taking photographs. They wouldn't have missed this party for anything.
One of them lights the candle, another turns off the lights. Her gap-toothed smile broadens, she starts to drool. Someone leans across with a napkin and wipes her chin.
She's can't express her gratitude with words, but they can see how much she's enjoying herself.
They start to sing. It's time to blow out the candle. Just the one, to symbolise a century; one hundred would have been too many.
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The Reader's Digest 100 Word Story Competition is open until the 31st December 2014. You can enter your own story here. Hyphenated words count as one. Good luck!
Have you ever written a 100 word story or any other very, very short work of fiction?
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