Kevin's Watch

BBC's Radio 4 has an anual competition where contestants are invited to submit a story in 50 words or less, the winner to be announced at a certain date and to recieve a small prize etc. The rules are simple in that the story must (obviously) be in 50 words or less, hyphonated words being taken as two, and the story must follow the Aristotelian(?) requirement of having a beginning, middle and an end. I'm not clever enough to be able to do this, but below is an example of the kind of thing that is submitted.

"Hello Son" he said. "You've had a difficult time"
"Yes Father", the man replied, "But I'm OK".
"Was it very bad" the father asked
The Son paused. "It wasn't the nails, it was the kiss that hurt".

OK Guy's. Let's see what you can do!

Alright, but you mustn't say I'm old-fashioned. Here's mine:

The prince rides in to the foreign village, seeking treasure.
All doors are closed to him.
Three princesses, disguised in rags, eye him from their dormer window.
One dreams. One schemes.
A servant girl appears to offer him water for the horse.
She will ride back to his country.

Do you have a link where I could enter this?

It sounds like you think this is really cool, but you say you can't do it... Pffft! C'mon, try something! (I bet you even have something you want to try!)

That's lovely Lina Heartlistener. I'm a sucker for am old fashioned love story, so that does it for me!
I'm sure the radio station that does the competition does have at least an e-mail adress for entries so I will see if I can find out something about it for you.
As to my own efforts - well, I believe I did once come up with a story but it has long since slipped my mind. However.......Yes, as I started the thread it is certainly right that I should 'nail my colors to the mast' and submit a composition. I'll work on it over the next day or two and see what I can come up with. As they say in the modern parlance 'Watch this space!'

I'm sure we used to have a thread for this very thing. Might be interesting reading to dig it up again.

Nice, lookin' forward to it! (a story and/or a thread-bump.)

We could try having a thread where each person to post chooses a theme / element / object to occur in the next person's story. Or maybe the first sentence. (Maybe that would be for another thread, though.)

Heyyyy... has the Watch ever done a "collaborative story" where each person writes the next paragraph??? P'raps not the thing for the Hall of Gifts, though.

I seem to recall something along the lines of a collaborative story. Might have been in Mallory's...

Let me think on this.

So, I found this:
kevinswatch.ihugny.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=9408

Which is apparently my attempt to revive the 55 word story thread after it had mysteriously vanished. If I remember rightly, the original had a lot of pages. Ah well. I do like some of what was posted in that one, though.

Wake up; I heard; a toothless lizard was eating half my body and the other half fighting to get out, my father sitting by and saying, It’s no use. Don’t fight it.

And I woke.

NICE ONE, LF. Thanks for finding & bumping the thread, Murrin!

A man swore at me and I continued walking. Some girls laughed at me and I kept my head down. People sneered and jeered as I went past, and I was undeterred. A young boy offered a smile of friendship. I turned and walked away. The smile hurt the worst.