writing a story 100 words at a time

I started writing in the 100words.com project in July 2022 and have been writing daily for it through now. I don't plan to quit. There are no prompts, just "write 100 words each day". Below is my very first entry.

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Oh, I thought there might be a prompt or theme. Guess not.

OK, I can do this. It's just a hundred words. Right? Deep breaths. I got this.

My stomach hurts. I can hear my wife on a Zoom meeting in the next room, but we're kind of in the same room. It's distracting. As are these various pains in my joints. It's no fun getting old. Being old may be fun, but I'm not there yet. I'm too young to be old, but old enough to miss my squandered youth.

Ah, that wasn't so bad. Next time will better.

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After my first month, I read some other completed batches and saw that there were people doing 100 word stories. I was intrigued. I had previously seen microfiction on Twitter, but a 250 character story felt too daunting. Short stories in general feel too short for me to write, as I have a hard time keeping myself in check when writing. But I thought I'd try my hand at a 100 word story all the same. If nothing else, it would be a new experience. The day after I wrote about considering trying it out, I wrote one. I'm quite pleased with it.

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“I need a hero,” she said to no one in particular as she surveyed the growing crowd of zombies in the parking lot below.

Despite everyone telling her she should quit smoking, Sheila found it funny that it was her sneaking up the roof for a quick cigarette that kept her from the carnage below. She’d heard screams and thought it was a shooter so she pulled the brick holding the door and hid behind the HVAC unit. Two days she’s been up there.

How long can somebody survive without water? she wondered to herself. “I need a hero. Soon!”

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But what about longer pieces? Writing a story 100 words at a time is interesting. I did it a little while back, writing 2,800 words in 28 of 30 days. I really wanted that story to be exactly 3,000 words in 30 days, but shit happened. Still, I was mostly pleased with how it turned out. I would not just stop at 100 words regardless of where I was. I had to finish the sentence (and preferably paragraph). Or, if I was using dialogue, I would allow myself to have the character say their line and end it there as long as the punctuation used would not result in a comma, because I still wanted to use the... I don't know the word right now. Basically, something like:

"I better follow him,"

-next day below-

Steve said aloud.

would not work for me. But something like:

"Now where could he be going?"

-next day below-

Steve wondered aloud.

would work for me. I wanted each entry to be self contained, so ending with a comma felt bad to me. I realize starting with Steve wondered aloud. might be jarring to the reader, but it felt less so, at least.

Sometimes I could thread the needle on my "first try". I'd see that I had 92 words (there's a counter) and would say a sentence out loud, counting on my fingers and it would be 8 words. Or 7, but I could add a word in or take one out if it was 9. But sometimes I needed 11 words to say what I wanted and I would look back over what I had already and see if I could take some words out. If I couldn't, I'd change how those 100 words ended, shifting the direction of where I thought the story would go.

My first 100 words of the story are below.

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Shev got in his car and just drove. No plans, no goals, just him and the road. Whenever he got to a red, he would quickly eeny, meeny, miny, moe his next direction. Two hours later and he had no idea where he was, but he did know he was getting hungry. He decided to abandon his little game and find somewhere to rustle up some grub.

When he got to the next light, Shev looked around for signs of food. Literal signs would be ideal, but he would take what he could get. Suddenly, an aroma caught his nose.

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I have plans to publish the story as part of a collection, so while it is publicly available, I don't want to spoil the ending for anyone. I will just say that. I had no plans for this story, just like Shev (I often name the characters something monosyllabic that may or may not be a name I'm previously aware of, this one was more of a non-sense word than a name, but I went with it) had no plans for his day. It wasn't until the fifth entry that I had an idea of where the story was going to go. 

(Not sure what's going on with the fonts, btw, and I'm probably not going to try to fix it. If I do, this won't get edited out, so you'll be confused for a little bit. And for all I know, they are only screwy in this window and not the final product.)

I have also been adding to existing works 100 words a time, though not with any regularity. These existing works did not have any such rules in place, so I would end mid-paragraph if I got stuck or too tired to keep going. But any 100 word entries would have these rules, which lead to some interesting transitions, as I also have been working on the pieces outside of the 100 words. Basically, they overlap when I need to do my 100 words and I want to add to my WIP.

I've been working on another new piece after trying out Bing's AI program and it gave me a 100ish words short story about a woman fighting a horde of zombies. So far I've written 1,100 words on it. My actual writing so far has used none of the AI-generated content from the 100ish word piece, but reading the story gave me inspiration to write my own. It's kind of weird, because I had to tell it the prompts to use, but I was not inspired to write my own story with just the prompt material. Below is today's 100 words on my current WIP. 

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At each intersection Bee would peer down to find a similar wall of cars blocking her way. Twice she spotted someone standing behind them, as if on a raised platform. She was glad for her shitty binoculars, because at least she could see them but they probably couldn't see her. She had also heard more gunshots, but could tell she was at least moving further away from their source.

Bee had walked maybe a mile and finally found an unblocked path. She walked a few more blocks, to give them a wide berth. No need to draw attention to herself.

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Yesterday I asked it to give me a 500 word story using the same prompt and it kept crapping out after a while, saying the connection was bad. It's a shame that it auto-deleted what it had come up with so far, as the introduction to the character was something I didn't include in my own longer version of the story. I just started in medias res. If I were to incorporate the longer version's intro, I would still want to tweak it at minimum, but probably re-write a good portion of it so that there wouldn't be a noticeable line in style difference.

Writing this all out has really made me want to stop having a day job (even moreso than my usual fuck work attitude) and be a writer full-time.