Saturday, 7 March 2020

What would you consider the worst short story you've ever written?


The worst short story is the one I haven't written for whatever reason: it wasn't good enough; I didn't have the time; there were more important projects; etc, etc,etc

Because you learn from everything you do, even the bad stuff - particularly the bad stuff.

However, my English teacher would tell you that my worst short story was titled
"The Shorter-Than-Short, Shortest Short Story In The World"
And it broke all of the rules: I used different fonts to indicate different people; I misspelled words to denote accent and pronunciation; I used the position of words on the page for artistic effect; and as the protagonist of the story walked away at the end, mumbling to himself, I made the writing smaller and smaller to indicate fading with distance.

I got zero out of ten for it. But I got two useful things out of it: some kudos amongst my mates: and a realization of the Tyranny of the Ghost Book. The art of writing had become so reduced that all that mattered was the choice of the word and the sequence you put them. Everything else was just white coral bones. As far as I was concerned, that was a terrible loss.

Because of that story, I started to take an interest in illumination, graphic design, logo design, word art, advertising, graffiti and any other art form where image and words combined to tell a story.

Credit: The header image is available as wallpaper from wall.alphacoders.com


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