EXPRESS YOURSELF

Beyond Recognition: A Writing Challenge

The same story, told in exactly 100, 500, 1000, and 3000 words

Photo by Candice Picard on Unsplash

A brief explanation:

This November, in lieu of

NaNoWriMo

, I’ve challenged myself to write something every day based on the daily writing prompts posted by

Ravyne Hawke

for the publication Promptly Written. The fiction prompt for 4 November reads:

You run into someone from High School that you haven’t seen for a decade. Something has changed about him/her. Set the scene . . . Decide what’s changed. Write a scene or a full story.
Word Length — 100 words exactly

It was a significant challenge for me to tell a coherent story in just 100 words, but I was really proud of my story, “Recognition.” I knew that I could have made the story much longer, and wondered if something is lost — or gained? — by constraining writing to a short word count. To fill in a day without a writing prompt (for November, there will be fiction or poetry prompts every weekday, plus one per weekend, leaving me without a prompt on Sundays), I decided to challenge myself to rewrite “Recognition” in 500, one thousand, and three thousand words — but otherwise keeping the plot, style, and characters exactly the same.