The January 2014 Challenge
The January 2014 Commuter Challenge is to write a short story with a twist ending. The story must be between 500 and 3,000 words long.
The story and twist can take any form: it can be a Twilight Zone fantasy, a gruesome Hitchcockian theme, it can be a more homespun O. Henry-type twist, or whatever you want.
The Results
Read Ryan’s story.
Read Brian’s story.
I was pretty worried when I first saw this challenge. Twist endings strike me as being tricky to manage, especially when your audience is expecting there to be one (cf much of the corpus of M. Night Shyamalan). It wasn’t until the second half of the month that I had an idea for a setup with a twist ending, but it was brittle and contrived at first. I mentally fiddled with the scenario for some time, whipping it into better shape, but still it didn’t really hang together. I was fretting over it while lying in bed on the 29th when a completely different idea occurred to me, and that’s what I wound up using instead. This idea was much more solid; its only down side is that it’s very reminiscent of a scene in one of my Nanowrimo novels, and thus likely already familiar to 100% of my audience, a.k.a. Ryan. Hi, Ryan.
In general I much prefer to avoid writing about situations that are completely outside of my experience, since one is then forced to fall back on knowledge gleaned entirely from fiction, movies and/or TV. Unfortunately, that leaves out a lot of situations, including just about everything that people find interesting. Then again, what kind of challenge would it be if didn’t push you out of your comfort zone now and then?
by Brian — 2 February 2014 @ 19:42