2011-08-13

2011-08-13 11:12 am

Writing wankage: 50 words, The Twelve Brothers

I've been having a lot of fun lately working on 50 word retellings of fairy tales.  After doing 8 or 10, I'm graduating up to 75.
I decided after staring at the bloated, 11,000 word draft of my last completed/revised short story that I was never going to learn how to cut down from too many words, and I would be better served trying to learn to write my way up - what can I do with 50 words, then 75, then ... etc.  In only, what, a year?  I might have made it up to a proper short story length of 2,000 or so.

So far the best one, I think, was The Twelve Brothers.
The Twelve Brothers (in 50 words) )

I tried to go straight from 50 to 100, but it was honestly too hard.  100 words seemed like so many, there were a dizzying number of options about what to do with all those words.