I came across this via The parasite guy‘s blog this morning.
You know how writing contests (and blog fiction challenges for that matter) always have word limits? Well, Scott Bartlett did not like the six-hundred-word limit of a contest he entered, so he wrote a story making fun of the word limit…and won!
Actually the story can work as a pretty good template for what should be in a short story if you really think about it.
Click on the title to read Six-Hundred by Scott Bartlett.
And in case you missed my attempt at romantic comedy in yesterday’s Song Title Challenge, go read Rollin’ With My Homies and tell me what you think.
Have a good one.
if all else fails...use a hammer 
Not really in response to the post, but I’ll comment anyway…
I like the little broken hammer icon you’ve added to your sidebar. (Can you tell I’ve been away from the blog a while?)
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Thanks. Yes, and your absence was noted 😉
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That’s a rather neat story! I once wrote a book that had a VERY specific publisher-imposed word limit, by section, because the text was required to meet a pretty cool interior design with repeating grid pattern – not exactly form following function, but a case where the book was an artistic whole of which the text was but a component. I managed it via some curious stylistic convolutions.
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That sounds interesting. Didn’t that end up making it hard to read? I hope you’ll expand a bit more on that one in your series on style.
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Will do. It was all to do with control. The concept of ‘whole package’ worked a treat, because the book ended up on the best-seller NF list in New Zealand for several months (though I didn’t quite knock the cookbooks off the top slot).
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