Short Story Contest! [DISCUSSION THREAD]

Pesmerga said:
I figure KA's describes a dictionary or thesaurus.!
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Oh shi-

It's really interesting that people have interpreted this as a challenge to actually construct a riddle about a particular object. As Viperidae suggests, v. much like those in the Exeter Book. The idea of KA's story actually being " a dictionary or thesaurus" is just something that had not at all crossed my mind (I took it as a story discussing language itself) because that kind of actual riddle is slightly distinct from what I originally intended the topic to mean. It's intruiging, and the mutation is cool.
 
Oh ffs this this the second time that I've had to recover my story now.
Posting.
 
Wow everyone is barely scraping the 300 word mark, I'm gonna feel weird posting my 1000 word behemoth. :P
 
Never mind, I'll allow it in. It's not that important.

Detected heavy borrowings from Philip Roth's The Breast?
 
If it wasn't the other guy, I'd file a fomal complaint.
 
Exactly the work which Roth's hero, transfigured into a gigantic woman's breast, references. Guess you were on the same page, or one close by. :p
 
that sounds like a ripoff of the one where the guy's transformed into a fly.
 
Sulkdodds said:
Exactly the work which Roth's hero, transfigured into a gigantic woman's breast, references. Guess you were on the same page, or one close by. :p
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Cool, and my story is more metaphorical than anything. "make the usual unusual", so I just had the narrator describe everyday objects as if he were seeing something totally alien and surreal, though none of what he describes is really surreal or alien, if you take it at face value.
 
I had an idea but I don't think I can make it long enough. I'll see.
 
Theotherguy's was utterly terrifying.

Well done.
 
I'm really good at writing stories (I'm writing a HL2 based story atm and I'll post it on the forum when i've finished it) but there is no way I'd be able to write anything on the subject of "making the commonplace strange". I've never written anything like that and so would probably struggle to do so.
 
I've never written anything like that either but I just finished it in less than thirty minutes.
 
Well, you can't have found it that hard then, surely?
 
The hard part was making it at least 300 words. I got the idea once I had read the brief but it wasn't one that made a long story easily. Even though it's really short I felt like I had to really draw it out to reach the requirement. Just take this as a opertunity to mess with people's heads :p
 
This A-Bike character... Is he the greatest poster this forum has ever seen? He's a f*cking genius. I must uncover his secret!
 
Theotherguy's story is my favourite so far. A-Bike's is really good too. Did you know that bikes are one of the most efficient machines we have? I figured out what Slug's was about about two sentences in.

I'd like to know what people think of mine. I tried to make it so that you can't tell what the hell is really going on until you read the last line, and then the rest of the story makes sense. I want to know if I succeeded.
 
Oh, you succeeded. I checked the spoiler a bit too early though, so I may have figured out along the way.
 
KineticAesthetic said:
This A-Bike character... Is he the greatest poster this forum has ever seen? He's a f*cking genius. I must uncover his secret!
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His secret is making a character and sticking to it. He is like the Stephen Colbert or Borat of hl2.net. Restricting himself to being a bike makes it lot more difficult, I'd imagine, to participate as frequently or in the way he would sometimes like to on the forums. When he does post though, it is a treat

Edit: I'm not the best writer, nor do I think I really understood the theme, but I hope you like mine
 
Riomhaire gave me a lol.

I'm wondering how people would cope with a 1000 word minimum limit. I'm thinking of setting the next edition as 1000-3000 words. And how long do people think they need for voting?

Not entirely enamoured of efforts that take the topic as a mission to build an elaborate riddle ending with a punchline, but I guess that possibility is implicit in the subject, and perhaps I should not have expected people to refrain. Some of them work really well anyway.

Iron Kat said:
I'm really good at writing stories (I'm writing a HL2 based story atm and I'll post it on the forum when i've finished it) but there is no way I'd be able to write anything on the subject of "making the commonplace strange". I've never written anything like that and so would probably struggle to do so.
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I'm kind of glad about this. The intention was to give people a challenge in their writing tasks, rather than to offer them a fairly passive objective like "write about the sea". Hopefully you will find the next one easier.
 
Hey I just realised, I unintentionally implied that the turret's creators were settled upon human bodies, like items of clothing.
 
Sulkdodds said:
Riomhaire gave me a lol.

[...]

Not entirely enamoured of efforts that take the topic as a mission to build an elaborate riddle ending with a punchline, but I guess that possibility is implicit in the subject, and perhaps I should not have expected people to refrain. Some of them work really well anyway.
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It wasn't my intention when I started the story to end it with a punchline, only to have a story about something most of us are familar with (I'm being very careful to avoid spoilers here :P) but that should not make sense untill one has finished reading. Then it should all make sense on the second read. Using a punchline just seemed like the easiest way of doing that. Also, I just like to make people laugh. Most essays/stories I write for English are humourous. As I was ending it the two ideas (the actual topic of the story and the humour) just came together and I ended up with the punchline. I think it worked out nicely.

Sulkdodds said:
I'm wondering how people would cope with a 1000 word minimum limit. I'm thinking of setting the next edition as 1000-3000 words. And how long do people think they need for voting?
Click to expand...
Good idea. Most of these (mine included) are far too short. Although I don't think I could have made mine much longer without really drawing it out way to much and making it really quite repetative. I didn't pick a subject matter that really allowed for much of an ongoing character development or plotline. I was stretching it to make it to 300. Hell, I didn't even originally intend for there to be any companions, not to mention two. They were added to fill space. If I write a proper story for the next one it will a decent length, I promise. Then again, that's what I said to my English teacher, and my French teacher :P
 
Oh yeah, it's not that I'm criticising anyone's story specifically. It's just that there's been more of those kind of stories than I expected. The structure where the audience wonder what the hell is being talked about, are given clues, and then the story ends with a punchline - the narrative movement from confusion to recognition. Actually, I feel the overuse of that rather distracts from the actual defamiliarising; the story seems to become entirely focused on that punchline. I don't particularly object to the method, but so many people have done it that the contest risks becoming a parade of ever-clever-cleverer reveals. Mainly I just wanted to point out the contrast in what I expected from entries, and what was received. Probably I shouldn't be surprised: it's the most obvious and in many ways the most effective example of the topic trope.

I think my favourite story so far is A-Bike's. Although it too has this perhaps-unnecessary focus on being confusing and opaque, what I liked about it was the devices it used. Because it's fairly obvious what it's talking about (bikes, cars, travel) that means you can look more at how it is actually describing those things. I loved the comparisons to ecology and the occult. And a good way to explain what I'm talking about is to say that those comparisons could have been done even if it had been really really explicit what it was about.

I've just realised that there are quite a few things, things I wrote earlier, that I could enter in this competition. Just not sure if I should. :p

EDIT: I hasten to add that my opinions are slightly irrelevant. I'm not doing the judging. Y'all are.
 
We're on GMT? More hours for me!

And yes Sulk, agreed. My thoughts exactly on the 'parade of reveals.' Confusion and mystery can be a good drive, but there has to be a balance, and at this word length that's harder to do, especially when there's essentially no narrative. If mine were to have the 'reveal' (which it won't) I'd much prefer to do the twist--lure the reader into thinking the subject is one thing, and at the end it turns out to be another. I find that much more powerfully alters the reader's understanding of the subject, as it forces them to think of it (or refuse to) in a new fashion.

But then again, even that's a cliche. It's just harder to do.
 
Sulkdodds said:
I'm wondering how people would cope with a 1000 word minimum limit. I'm thinking of setting the next edition as 1000-3000 words. And how long do people think they need for voting?
Click to expand...
If it's a topic I can think of something for, that'd be fine.
 
Hehehehehehehe

*Saruke pats himself on the back for being so clever*
 
Your story describes a hungry man ordering food at Burger King. I wouldn't go so far as to call it clever.
 
*sigh* I hope you feel better about yourself for belittling me.
 
It's best to be humble, Saruke, especially when it comes to your own work. You haven't really unfamiliarized something, rather you simply plugged in a thousand unneeded adjectives and overused phrases.

Despite, I will post mine before midnight tonight (EST). Which is in 5 hours and 40 minutes.
 
Screw you! Sulkdodds said May 3rd! The heart of America is in EST and dammit, that's the time the world is counting by!
 
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