100 DAYS PROJECT: #61
A Compendium of Sixteen Four-Sentence Stories
In the name of brevity, I’ve tried to follow the concept of short, short story and yet with the hypertext possibilities I expanded the stories into sixteen. While none are earth-shattering story they are dramatic and complete.
As the map shows, all stories start with the same sentence, then branch from there, each writing space a sentence that takes the story into a slightly different direction. The initial branching from the first sentence to the second represents a major difference in story, characters, etc., the first sentence having established two things: narrative pov and setting. Then, in pyramid fashion, the story is refined by its plot and finally, by the fourth sentence, its ending.
While I could see this as a more elaborate concept, with some of the stories connecting to the endings of others to form a huge network of changing stories, I preferred to stop here to keep them all under 100 words each (most run about 85) and in just four sentences exactly.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology