Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Short Story

Today, on Twitter (please, stop throwing things), I decided to write a snippet of a story. Not really a short story, just a kind of evocative moment from a story. The challenge being that Twitter only lets you post 140 characters tops.

So I wrote a little bit about Rusty, a farmer, who's surprised to see it rain.

Here's what I (after about a dozen revisions) came up with:

Stepping down, gingerly, his boots send up a cloud of dust to mimic the grey draped on the horizon. He shades his eyes with his hand: "Hm."


You should try it! It's fun. And if you don't have a Twitter (snobs), you can just limit yourself manually. (Leave your story as a comment to this post, or link to it so I can read it.)

4 comments:

aquietsoul said...

The autumnal glory of the seething colours diffused his anguish into dull dust. That moment, with shattering splendour, pierced his soul.

- I'm Australian, in case you were puzzling over my spelling. Forgive my intrusion into your blog. It's autumn here, and that inspired my story. I also followed the "dust" cue!

Andrew Price said...

Welcome!

I grew up on many British authors (and authours), so I'm not thrown off to see the occasional 'u' thrown into the centre of a word. (That last one was for you too.)

The only hitch being of course, that if you had a extra word you wanted to squeeze in there but were down by two letters, you could revert to the American spellings of the words!

Anyway, beautiful story, and thank you for commenting!

I do like the word "diffused" a lot.

G'day! (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

pilgrim said...

When I read your story I couldn't help but think of the yellow and dead field that flooding had left across the mid-west this last summer. My family drove through Illinois and Iowa and there were a lot of dead fields.
Anyway, I had to continue the farmer and rain theme.

The continual downpour had turned once dry fields into swamps, yellow produce peaking out of ponds. “So much for this year’s crops...Darn.”

Andrew Price said...

Love the story and the accompanying thoughts, Pilgrim!

Love the pathos of the one thing the land needed (rain) not even being able to do anything (damaging to boot).

Anyway, good story. Thanks for letting us read it!