"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
-Ray Bradbury
So, back in 2019 (Aug. 19th to be precise) I got the wacky idea to challenge myself with 100 unique, 100 word short stories. I thought it would be a good opportunity to delve in to, what I hoped, might be some interesting micro-fiction featuring all sorts of different ideas, scenarios, and characters. Ultimately it took me five months to finish 100 varied pieces, or about 5 stories a week.
While a person might think writing a 100 word short story is easy, imagine doing it 100 times while trying not only to have some semblance of originality, but to actually MAKE SENSE. Also consider the fact that when I started, I didn’t have a word count feature on my phone, so I would have to count each word multiple times to make sure the micro-fiction was only at 100 (insanity, ha!).
Ultimately, I was content with the outcome of the challenge, as it allowed me to explore strange new landscapes and have many interesting adventures. They are all odd little snapshots of imagination and observation. One hundred words were limiting, but also liberating. There’s more pressure to tell a tale in such a confined space, but there’s also less pressure to paint a grand, epic, and fleshed out picture.
Then, recently I asked myself “What if you made them into 365 short stories of 100 words each?” And, by Gawd, that’s what I decided to do! There’s really no deadline to hitting the 365 mark, but I would like to keep it consistent with 3 – 5 per week, which takes us well into 2023. The goal is to finish it all, and publish it in some capacity, even if just as an online collection.
Long story short (no pun intended), I want to sincerely thank those people, past and present (and hopefully future!), who check out these little stories, give feedback, etc. If nothing else, I hope it inspires a little creativity and motivation for other artistic types out there. Likewise, the first batch of 1 – 100 are all available at: https://www.instagram.com/makeartnotmemes/
I’m sure I’ll move the newer pieces to Instagram too at some point, but I’ve barely used the account over the past year and not sure what to do with it yet. Anyway, thank you again for reading! I’ll do my best to not bullshit, keep it consistent, and tell some decent stories. I’m excited about the journey, and will have a better feel for things once we hit the halfway point of 182.5, hopefully by July of this year.
