100 Words

[MeetBow]

The stories you think of may be tens of thousands of words long. Long, deep plots with epic battles and confrontations, with romance, sorrow, and joy. We all want to meet the goal of writing something like this. But there is another, much less appreciated side of writing, that can say so much in so few words. A mere one hundred words, put together with skill, is in my opinion, better than that of any massive novel. Each word means much more than it normally would. Could you do this? I'm posting this to find out (And to test all you writers' mettle)

How it works

It's a story composed of 100 words. Easy, right?
Protip: I'm not going to do word counts or anything, so a few words might slip by

Also, you can have as many stories as you like in one post, so don't be shy!

Good luck, and choose your words carefully!

 

[FallaciaSonata]

There once lived a man named Joe, in a small town known as Average. The denizens of this rather ordinary town were equally ordinary.

One day, Joe decided to break the monotony. Joe decided to do something out of the ordinary. Joe decided to do something above average.

Joe meandered up and down the streets, doing kind deeds. Opening doors, assisting the elderly, and spreading kindness to each and every average citizen.

At the end of the day, Joe returned home irritable. All that effort and no reward. Tossing the paper away, Joe vowed never to read fortune cookies ever again.


- Potato Man

 

[e]

Eh, I used to do that as an exercise; picked it up from Penny-Arcade, as weird as that may sound. I can't remember which comic, but Tycho wrote about this guy who'd been doing this for over a year, and it was a pretty interesting experiment: writing a 100 word story every day.

I pretty much lost mines when I trashed my WordPress install, but here's one I more or less remember:

He sits down, inhaling; his shaky hand turns up the volume, embracing the room with arpeggios and dissonant chords.

He smiles.

As he closes his eyes, he can see a pot-bellied middle-aged man, a child precariously perched on his arm; the air is filled with smiles and the smell of content. The child holds a red speed car in his hand, waving it to and fro.

The music accelerates, streaming down his face, bitter, fading; he opens his eyes.

A tear slides down his cheek as blood splatters across an old battered model of a red speed car.

This is an idea that I had for a 5 minutes short film; it's heavily based on the accompanying music and the setting (there's no dialogue, after all), so it's not exactly as powerful when you write it down. The music is by Philip Glass (The Hours). Either way, the short was about a man who's living in the past, unable to relinquish his child hood and assume adulthood; there's quite a bit more visual details in the short which link the past and the present and highlight the man's inability to cope with his present situation and how he keeps all these items as a security blanket.