I've just come third in a short story competition, a feat of which I am immensely proud. An odd little competition where the competitors were asked to write a short story of no more than 3000 words set in the world of any specific Roleplaying Game the writer wished.
Writing to a short word count proved a challenge. My outline rapidly ballooned and translating it into prose went way past the limit.
Cutting it back was painful. I lost a scenes, flashbacks and entire conversations. These cuts explained character motivations and help the story make sense. They were painful cuts. Then, once they were gone I had to re work other conversations to fill in the gaps.
After that I was still too long! It became a case of working each sentence, looking for a way to rephrase so that it could be reduced. It took three passes of this before I hit the word count limit.
It was a real challenge, hard effort. Seems to have paid off in the end :)
Here's a link to the Entries and Entrants. You may need to log into the RPGGeek site to download the stories .
Writing to a short word count proved a challenge. My outline rapidly ballooned and translating it into prose went way past the limit.
Cutting it back was painful. I lost a scenes, flashbacks and entire conversations. These cuts explained character motivations and help the story make sense. They were painful cuts. Then, once they were gone I had to re work other conversations to fill in the gaps.
After that I was still too long! It became a case of working each sentence, looking for a way to rephrase so that it could be reduced. It took three passes of this before I hit the word count limit.
It was a real challenge, hard effort. Seems to have paid off in the end :)
Here's a link to the Entries and Entrants. You may need to log into the RPGGeek site to download the stories .
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