WordWatchers holds two short story competitions a year, nominally one in the summer and one in the winter. Generally, we pick a theme (or if there's a competition out in the "Real World" we'll align with that), give ourselves a month to write the story, a month to score and critique them and then we generally have a little party and announce the winners. We also have a good laugh at how bad we generally all are at guessing which of us wrote what story.However, this winter what was clear was that we were in great danger of not having a short story competition! Unthinkable, but true. So, it was decided that we would have a very very short story competition instead, based on the format found on the Paragraph Planet website. We decided we could cope with that because even if everybody entered there would only be 750 words to read.We were also very fortunate to persuade Richard Hearn who runs Paragraph Planet to act as an external judge. This wouldn't affect our own "internal" scoring but it would be interesting to get the input from somebody who has to pick a new paragraph every day. Richard also wrote us a very nice little blurb (which is included verbatim within this post) about the competition and, to our delight, he also offered to run his favourite three on the Paragraph Planet site.What Richard had to say was:"Thank you to WordWatchers for inviting me to judge their annual writing competition, and I’m touched that the competition has been inspired by Paragraph Planet. (The word count means I'm also very much in my comfort zone!) I’ve been impressed by the strength of your entries and have genuinely struggled to whittle the entries down to a top 3. It’s always going to be a subjective decision, especially when all the authors have really got to grips with the demands of the format. I myself keep changing my mind, and I am sure others will have their own, different, favourites. However, a judge cannot reserve judgement forever. Before announcing the winners, I thought I’d reflect on what makes a good piece of flash fiction. What do I look for? I look for 75 words that work. They somehow need to be working together, towards the same goal. That goal is different for each submission - it might be a mood piece, a mini story, a comedic moment, or, probably the most popular when done right, a twist-in-the-tale - but somehow it’s about all the words working together consistently to achieve their own aim. (Scratch that. ‘Consistently’ sounds too dull. It’s often the jarring word that makes the paragraph. Let‘s just say, the paragraph has to work as a whole in a specific, original, and unexpected way.) I think all the entries from WordWatchers members were successful, but these final three are the ones that I felt stayed with me just that little bit more after reading. It was a close run thing but my top three will go on - in reverse order - on Sunday 2nd, Monday 3rd and Tuesday 4th December." So on Sunday 2nd, Richard published Abbie Todd's entry:
On Monday 3rd, Richard published Debbie Smith's entry:
And on Tuesday 4th, Richard published his winner, the story by Julian Dobbins:
What's interesting is that this is quite different from WordWatchers own results announced at our Christmas Party last night (7th).Our own results were as follows:Joint 3rd: Julian Dobbins and John Hoggard2nd: Abbie Todd1st: Mel GerdesAs you have seen Abbie and Julian's stories already, John and Mel's stories are reproduced below.John Hoggard's story:"Poor old Douglas flinched as the squawking voice of his ancient mother, upstairs in her bed, penetrated his thoughts. He poured the boiling water into the teapot and arranged the buttered toast neatly on the plate. He then laid out her vast array of pills, once again swapping her heart tablets for the identical looking ones prescribed to her festering cat. He didn’t know if the exchange was having an effect, but he hoped so."And Mel's winning (as far as WordWatchers is concerned) entry:"It wouldn't have happened if he'd made that one call home. We had an agreement you see, he'd call to let me know he'd arrived safely. But he got drunk and forgot so I spent the night awake, fearing the worst. When he finally walked through the door I lost it - grabbed the nearest pan and walloped him. The trouble was it was Le Creuset. Out stone cold. Sometimes it doesn't pay to buy quality..." It will certainly be interesting to discuss with Richard why we had such differing results (although it could be argued that two stories both featured in the top 3 of both decisions).WordWatchers would once again like to thank Richard at Paragraph Planet for his time and expertise.Merry ChristmasJohn H