The Shortest Stories

Sizing Up a Story

The New Times of San Luis Obispo has been hosting a Fifty-Five Fiction contest since 1987.  The point of the contest is to write a short story in fifty-five words or less.  If it sounds hard, you’re getting the gist.  Especially at first, the mind is inundated with ideas too large to squeeze into fifty-five words.  Here is an example titled “Five Open Books” by Mark Lodge from Los Osos, CA:

75 feet up a vertical granite wall, one hand jammed into a crack to hold my weight, 10 numb toes pressed flat against a flake, beads of sweat make my grip tenuous and eyes sting. Movement captures my attention; a lizard scales the very wall I climb. And then the little creep starts doing pushups.

            My idea is to use this to introduce a short story unit.  I think it would be fun to think-pair-share the stories by reading some examples from past winners, then taking the time to write three each. After this the students would come together in partners and choose one another’s best of the three, then present them to the class.  It would get them talking about their own fiction writing while also reinforcing the idea that word count doesn’t make a story.  It will also push the students to be exact with their language, avoiding that tricky issue some students have of bogging down sentences with adverbs.