100 Word Stories

100 WORD STORIES

Happy Sunday,

I found the following writing exercise in a Writer’s Digest magazine.  To help fine tune the number of words used to tell a story or a description, practice writing a story that does not have more than 100 words.

What a Challenge!!!!

The point of this practice is to train your brain to concentrate on what is specific to the actual story.  To rid the story of the word clutter that isn’t necessary to the narrative.

While writing my novel, I found myself fixated on the word count of the entire book as opposed to the substance of the story.

After writing several 100 word stories, the style of my writing for the novel changed.  Allowing me to add additional adventures to the overall story. 

The 1st draft of the stories shared below started out with 300-500 words.  After much thinking and thinking and many, many rewrites, I finally got the word count to the 100 mark.

This method of writing  has become a fun routine to record my life memories in a journal.

Enjoy!

High School/ College Years

My first boy crush in high school, Paul, a big football player with wavy blond hair and blue eyes, was in the popular group; I was not.  For the school’s formal Winter Dance, where girls ask boys, I found the courage to ask Paul, who said, yes.  With a new bracelet I wore on my left wrist, bought with babysitting money, to the dance we went.  It snagged into the back of his new suit jacket while we slowly danced.  With him holding my right hand, I worked that bracelet loose without his knowledge.  We became friends after the dance.

Travel

Kelly, best friends for 61+ years, has always been bold, confident and daring. 

I was shy, timid and scared.  She described our personalities as her being cream eye shadow and me being powder eye shadow.

Then the trip to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico happened.  After many Mexican margaritas while sunbathing on the beach, I have a gorgeous, very tall, boat captain slurping tequila out of my belly button, after I licked tequila out of his navel.  Kelly was extremely shocked and surprised to see such a sight. I am no longer the powder eye shadow girl from our childhood days.

100

Growing Up

There are six children in my family.  We lived in a Catholic neighborhood where many large families occupied the homes.  Every morning all the children walked to the Catholic elementary school we all attended.  The streets on the way were lined with big, tall trees that hung worm like buds from the branches.  My younger brother Joe was a prankster.  He would grab those buds and tell us girls that they were worms and would eat them making sure he was in our faces while he chewed the buds.  The girls would scream and gag running away from the boys.

Until the next Sunday

Kathy