Curious about 100 Word Stories?
A couple of prompts +Zoom class tomorrow!
(Write with us, we don’t run. Never.)
I won’t bury the lede, I’d love for more of you to join us tomorrow! There’s also some story analysis and prompts below!
Stories examples from Abbie Barker, Michelle Ross, Ethel Rohan, Roberta Beary, Manuel Gonzales, Jennie Bricker, Charmaine Wilkerson, and Michele Finn Johnson.
100 Word Stories
Cost: Pay what you want
When: April 22, 2025 1:00-2:30 pm EDT
Join me for a 1.5 hour generative writing session focused on writing 100-word stories! There’s something fun and exhilarating about trying to fit a story into such a small box! We’ll look at model texts and hopefully get inspired by the writing prompts! Participants will be able to start/finish 4–6 drafts. In these micros, every word counts because they must hold up the weight of all the words not used in the story. They must account for the unsaid, must create the unsaid, and provide the reader a chance to make inferences. Come create the unsaid with me and your fellow writers!
Example 1: Consider how to build context from the past and how this past has an impact on the future of the character. Characters are created by their choices, but this characterization is deepened when we have a sense or glimpse of how they have acted in the past as well.
Before She Knew Her Body Was the River by Anna Gates Ha
Prompt 1: Consider starting the story with a younger version of the character. How can we start to know them in their youth in this event? How does this event create, shape, explore the event in the next section when they are older? Consider how you can use the same image shifted from the first event to the second event. How can you enrich this character from event 1 to event 2? Is the first event scarring or traumatic? Do they better understand their youth now because of the second event? Consider how the snake links these two versions of this character. What objects, person, event, or animal might link your character’s past and present?
Example 2: Another way to look at escalation is to use sentences to create specific objects that are nestled into one another by the juxtaposition of each consecutive sentence! In “In Every Girl There is a Forest”, Jonathan Cardew, each sentence escalates by nestling an object inside another object. The literary equivalent of I know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, or If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. This is cause and effect applied immediately to the next sentence.
I love the use of anaphora here— the repetition of a word or phrase at the start of each section or, in this case, each sentence. Repetitions make us feel comfortable, make us feel in the know, but Cardew subverts this, because we don’t know what object will be inside each object. Instead of choices or actions, we have an escalation of objects. The story itself is the central metaphor, instead of the central metaphor being a part of the story.
This usually creates allegory or fable; a sense of a lesson, which can be tricky when done in longer stories. It can create a lack of implication or inference once the moral is discovered, but his story surprises with each new sentence! I feel something here; a burst of understanding, but I can’t quite put it into words, and that makes this piece special for me!
Prompt 2: Give us anaphora (repeated phrase or word, usually introducing a line or paragraph) and an escalation of objects or juxtapositions in each consecutive sentence. Try to defamiliarize (see the world in a different, but truthful way) our understanding of the objects and their relationships to each other. Give us a chance to see the worldly differently by the combinations you create!
Push your causation to the max by letting each sentence cause the effect of the next. Think of a circle, how you can start anywhere and still remain on the same path! Or forget all of this and focus intensely on an object, show us its importance by the desire of the main character to obtain it, keep it, protect it. Or show what lengths the main character would go to in order to destroy an object!
Flash Club Sample-Generative
Cost: Pay What You Want
Where: Online/Zoom
May 21: 10:00-12:00 EST
Join writer me for a two-hour generative writing session focused on my popular Catching Lightning Flash Club. Don’t have time for a weekly meeting? Get my analysis and prompts in a quicker format! We’ll look at some of my more popular model texts and hopefully get inspired by the writing prompts! Participants will have the opportunity to start 3–5 drafts during this session. Flash word count/space limits put pressure on the writer to create and or/reveal characters quickly, but specifically and uniquely if they want to form dynamic and affecting stories. I’ll show you some ways to do this in your own writing!
Very interesting. Thanks
got completely pissed off da last time i tried ta do dis...sign up...pay for your instructions. patience is not my virtue. i write flash and 100 word stories. love your writing especially the one in the set in the tornado -- gave me chills....gives me chills just thinkin' about it. my problem is i be a random submitter. you are likely another virtual robot. if not help me out. if you don't help me even tho i want to connect w/you i will have to have ta spam ya -- mark you as spam cause getting stuff from you when i can't get to sign up for you pisses me off. widow with writing talent plus a broken lawnmower plus grass needing cutting plus ants in the kitchen SO HELP ME GET TO YA!!!!! LIKE THE STUPES SCREAMING HALP HALP during katrina instead-- begging instead of slogging their way out HALP!