30 Tiny Stories in 30 Days

In June I successfully completed the Like The Prose challenge from the lovely folks at The Literal Challenge. The idea is to write 30 short stories in 30 days - one complete new piece of prose every day for a month.


I've completed their script writing challenge 28 Plays Later twice before - which to be honest was much further outside my comfort zone, as I never normally write scripts - so I was pretty confident going in, but motivation/procrastination is my constant enemy, plus I was going to be in a field for 3 days one weekend in June with only a phone to write on!

But... I succeeded! Some stories were written on my phone, some were written in a half-asleep mad rush before bed, some were squeezed in between multiple other competing priorities, but they all got done (which is more than I can say for any of my ill-fated NaNoWriMo attempts!)

The Format

At 10pm each day (starting on 31 May), you receive a prompt via email, and you then have 36 hours to submit your story (so until 10am on 2 June for Day 1). The final prompt arrives at 10pm on 29 June and must be completed by 10am on 1 July. If you miss the deadline you're disqualified! (Although you can still carry on and be an honorary completer if you finish all the stories.)

Responding to the prompts/themes isn't compulsory, but I find it really helps to have something as a jumping off point rather than trying to pull something from nothing out of your own brain every day!

The Stats

Because everyone loves some facts and figures, right?

In total I wrote 11,815 words, which works out as an average of 394 per day. I knew I was likely to be producing mainly flash fiction length stuff, working at this pace, so that's not a surprise.

My longest submission was 1,756 words, and my shortest was 49 words (and was actually six micro stories of between 6 and 9 words each!)

Breaking it down a bit further:

• 2 were over 1,000 words (for argument's sake, let's call this short story length)
• 8 were between 300 and 1,000 (pretty clearly flash fiction)
• 20 were under 300 words (likely to be classed as micro fiction, although all these categories have pretty blurred edges and are open to debate...)

Of the sub-300 word stories, 10 were under 200 words, and 2 were under 100 words!

The earliest I submitted a story was 8.59am the morning after receiving the prompt. The latest I submitted was 8.24am on the morning of the deadline (getting in with about 90 minutes to spare). My average submission time was somewhere between 10pm and midnight the night before the deadline.

Here's my winner's badge to prove it!

Any challenge like this is a bit of a wild ride, but if you can keep it up it's super motivating - I've now got 30 stories I didn't have in May! Inevitably some of them are terrible and should be hidden in a box and never read by anyone ever, but I reckon there are 15 or so I'd like to edit/do some more work on and see where they take me, which is 50% - I'm definitely calling that a win!

Now trying to ride some of this writing momentum into July and beyond... wish me luck!