Five Sentence Stories

 

Over twenty years ago, a writing friend and I would email each other these short, five sentence stories.  I think one of us had read about some famous author using such short stories as a way to get the juices flowing.  It was a challenge and we saw it as a way to hone our skills.  Ultimately, I turned a couple of these exercises into longer short stories and I’ve had a few in some of my story collections.

A few years ago, I gathered four of these stories and posted them on a website.  Unfortunately, the other week when I randomly remembered these and went to reread them, I found the website was no longer around.  But I fortunately was able to find a copy of the post I had made, so these random writing exercises from over twenty years ago will see the light of day again.

***

It’s uncanny how at the most inconvenient times – for me at least – my neighbor will start having sex. Last week I was talking to my parents and his girl of the week started screaming unintelligible words.

“What is that?”

“Nothing mom.” It would probably be really annoying if he could last more than a couple of minutes.

***

While walking home one day, I saw a guy waiting at a bus stop look in my general direction and mutter something. I thought I heard him ask what the time was. I looked at my phone, but before telling him that it was 4:37, I asked, “Excuse me?”

“Oh, nothing,” he said.

A few seconds after I had passed him I realized how odd it would be if you were minding your own business and some stranger walked up to you, told you the time, and then continued on their way thinking they had done you a favor.

***

“Living Death”

Nick sat on the couch with the TV remote in his hand. Click, click, click. The talk show channel, the game show channel, the unbelievably bad movie channel all flicked across the screen. Click, click, click. The sound of his life passing by.

***

“Captain Belch verses Sir Sudorific, Part III”

When last we saw brave Captain Belch, he had just discovered that the villainous Sir Sudorific had captured the lovely Polly Precious and tied her to a keg of gunpowder.

“You’re too late Captain Belch; all I have to do is drop this torch and your Polly Precious will be gone forever.”

“Bleeeeeeeaaaaaaacch,” replied the Captain. Not only did the noxious fumes of his belch render Sir Sudorific unconscious, it also blew out the torch, thus saving Polly.

“My hero,” she said, as Captain Belch untied her and took her in his arms.

***

Image from Pixabay.

Short story – “Plans”

“Plans”

Around the beginning of October, Anna had decided that after years of erratic work, 2025 would be The Year of Finishing Her Novel.  Her plan had been to wait until the holiday madness had passed, before hunkering down to write her still untitled magnum opus.  But then in November that utterly deplorable … thing (Anna couldn’t bring herself to call it human) was elected. 

The normal joys of the season were replaced with the heavy bitterness knowing this could very well be “The Last Happy Christmas.” As such, Anna had barely written anything for two months.  But in the “Final Days of Sanity,” she steeled herself to get to work.  The first thing she needed to do was clean up her desktop.  Carol had often said that it looked like something had exploded in her computer, but Anna insisted the dozens of documents for Human Characters, Alien Characters, Technology, etc. were all laid out in a bizarrely organized fashion.  Although, if pressed, the only organization she could actually point to was that they were all there on the desktop.

But now she dragged all of those files into a new Novel folder, and moved it to the corner in hopes of better days.  Anna had to use her writing skills for the good of all, because now 2025 had to be The Year to Fight For Freedom.

Random Writing Tips – Rewriting the same story

 

Twenty some years ago, I bought a book – probably at a library book sale – of the collected short stories of this author.  I can’t remember which author it was, but I’m pretty sure he had been active back in the 50’s and 60’s, and I think I’d read a few of his novels, so he wasn’t a complete unknown to me. 

About halfway through the book, I’m reading a story and thinking, I’ve read this before.  At first I figured it had been in some other collection, but then I realized that no, it was this collection like ten stories ago.  I forget exactly what the stories were, but it was something like these aliens arrive on Earth and there’s some misunderstanding with the first humans they meet.  All the names were different, and like one was set in Iowa with these blue-skinned humanoids aliens while the other was set in Florida with these purple dog aliens.  But the basic story was the same.  And then, another ten stories or so later, there was a third version of the story.  I believe, the book had a listing of where all these stories had been published, and I’m pretty sure the three appeared in different magazines over a period of five or six years.

I don’t know how frequently this happens to other writers, but often I’ll have an idea and the plot comes to a fork.  Sometimes, after some thought it is obvious that one fork is better than the other, but sometimes both options are equally good.  So I’ve written two, or more, stories from the same initial idea, but I always made them different stories.  Like someone could read them and see similarities, but they’d never be confused thinking they had already read one of them. 

At first, when I saw this well-known author doing something that seemed a bit shady, I felt a little betrayed.  I don’t know if the guy was desperate for money and needed to make a sale so he just quickly rewrote something, or if there was some aspect of the story that really spoke to him so he wrote new versions of it every few years as his skill improved.  It’s hard to say. 

I bring all this up because the constant jumbling of stuff in my head randomly brought back this memory.  And I realized that painters often paint the same thing multiple times to get the best version.  The same for photographers, and film makers, and artists of all kinds.  So why not writers?  Why shouldn’t we write the same story over and over again, honing our craft and getting the best version? 

It’s something I hadn’t really thought about before.  But now I think I might look up some of my earliest stories and rewrite them.  Just to see what my, hopefully, better skill can make of them.

***

Image from Pixabay.

My writing plans for 2025

A couple months ago, I made a decision about my writing plans for 2025.  Part of my 2024 plans had been to post a story each month on my website, one each month on my Ko-fi profile, and one every other month on one of my blogs.  The ones on my website I would get the idea, write it, and post it that month, while the others were either new ones I could write in advance, or revised stories.  So that’s thirty stories, about half of which were new.  Turns out, between everything else going on in my life, meeting those goals took most of my writing energy and I barely had any to work on other projects.  So my plan had been to stop the monthly stories and just post stories on my blogs whenever I felt like it, and put all my focus on two big projects. 

The first project would be to finish up Lunar Dreams, which is a collection of essays I have on colonizing the moon.  I’ve been working on it for a year-and-a-half, but I’ll work on it for a month or so, and then decide to take it in a new direction.  Then I work on it for another month or so, and then decide to take it in a new-new direction.  And then after a couple of months, to take it in a revised-old-new direction.  But I think I’ve finally figured out where I’m going with it.  So I just need to hammer out a few details, and give it a good polish.  Once I finished that, then I would get around to finishing Volume One of The Pathfinder Saga.  This is two novellas and a short story.  The first novella I started … over ten years ago and is 90% done, but I originally wrote it to be a standalone story.  The second novella is 70% done, and I’ve barely started the short story.  I’ve tried working to update the first novella before, but my plan had been to work on it every Wednesday and Thursday and that didn’t turn out so well.  This is a fantasy story, and while I just “understand” scifi stuff like starships and hyperspace, I need to immerse myself in the story to keep how the magic works and what creatures can do what.  And just doing that a couple days a week wasn’t working.  My hope was by focusing on the setting for months at a time I’d finally finish it.

Then the election happened.  My plans had been made with the expectation that the country wouldn’t be driven off a cliff by lunatics.  Now I need to spend some of my writing energy fighting a fall into a fascist dystopia.

My current plan is to still write a story each month on my website.  Before, I’d come up with the story and write it that month, but I waived that self-imposed rule at the end of 2024, so I’m doing away with it entirely.  This is helpful, because as I type this up at the end of December, I already have the January and February stories mostly finished.  I just need to give them a good polish.  I also have another story where I already have the framework, I just need to fill it all out, which I’m having a bit of trouble with.  This was to be the January story, but now I’ll have a few more months to work on it.  In the past, some of these Monthly Stories had been of a political or social nature, but I’d also throw in some fun ones.  But going forward, they will probably all be of a political or social nature. 

As to Ko-fi, I’m keeping my account, but I’m not planning on posting much there.  The point of posting a story every month was to try to get some traction to maybe start making money there, but that didn’t happen.  Maybe in the future, we’ll see.

I also plan on posting a story each month on one of my blogs.  These will likely be revised stories, or maybe some new fun ones. 

In 2024 I posted over thirty stories and was a bit burned out.  I had planned on only posting a couple while “relaxing” working on my big projects.  And now I’m planning on posting at least twenty-four stories, finishing Lunar Dreams and making some headway on The Pathfinder Saga, while hoping the country doesn’t collapse.  I have the sinking suspicion that 2025 will end with me even more burned out.