Results of Morgen’s 50-word Competition – May 2024

Hello everyone. I’m delighted to announce the results of the inaugural 50-word competition, with the theme of ‘second time round’ as follows:

JOINT WINNERS (each receiving a 1500-word editing credit)

Alyson Faye Rhodes with ‘The Sea Bench’
The couple snuggles on the bench. The man is eating fish, batter golden as sunshine. Salt spray splatters them whilst seagulls skulk.
The woman stands. The man grabs for her hand, touching only air.
She fades away and the sky swallows her.
‘See you next year,’ he says, tears overflowing.

Jane Broughton with ‘Glitter ball’
“Do you remember me, Mum?”
Her unfocused gaze slides over my face.
I hold the mirrored ball up, give it a spin and she claps her hands.
She’s a girl again, in the arms of the boy she loves, swirling through stars.
Lights reflect in her eyes, sparkling once more.

SECOND (receives a 1000-word editing credit)

Darren York with ‘It’s Me or the Dog’
I grabbed Benji and pushed him out onto the bank to safety.
Months of grief and regret, assuaged.
Our first dog had drowned after I refused to go into the water.
Forgiven?
Stricken by the cold, I was drowning.
I reached out for my wife’s hand, but it wasn’t there.

JOINT THIRD (each receiving a 500-word editing credit)

Amber Sayer with ‘The Last Loss’
She returned from the hospital, her womb empty, the car seat empty.
He hadn’t moved in two days.
“I’m sorry, there’s no heartbeat.”
She already knew the devastating words before they escaped the doctor’s mouth.
Eventually, she donated the unused crib.
She’d never survive hearing those haunting words three times.

Kate Twitchin with ‘Searching for Life’
“Go round again.”
“Waste of time.”
“They can’t have destroyed it all.”
“Deforestation, floods, droughts. It’s dead.”
“Go round again.”
“You’re the boss.”
“There! A tiny island.”
“A tiny green and pleasant land, yes, but for how much longer?”
“We’re too late.”
“So, where next?”
“Somewhere called Earth. Sounds promising.”

HONOURABLE MENTIONS – in alphabetical order (not winning a prize but something to add to their CVs)

• Emma Peng with ‘Dear Dad, It’s Déjà Vu’
• EW Farnsworth with ‘Back on the Bridge’
• Juan Andrés González Romero with ‘Imperceptible’
• Kirtan with ‘The Vampire’
• Marty B Rivers with ‘eBay Tidings’
• Rehanna Neky with ‘Armour’

Congratulations to everyone.

Morgen’s comments

I shouldn’t have debated, when creating this competition, whether halving the word count would decrease the quality of the submissions. They had just the same punch as their predecessors.

I’d also wondered whether I’d done enough advertising (very little; one blog post and emails to previous entrants) before it went live but I needn’t have worried. Many of you had already written the pieces as I was inundated in the first few days. Most competitions have the majority of submissions on the last day or certainly the week leading up to it.

This month saw 49 entries from 30 writers (I have a nerdy Excel spreadsheet which tells me this!). Wonderful.

It’s likely that many of you are planning on writing as a career, if not there already, so each month I will be sharing the top three stories in full as well as up to seven ‘honourable mentions’ so if you’re on the list, you can add this to your CV. If you’re not mentioned, don’t lose heart. In another batch, another month, you could well be.

And now for tips inspired by the entries

• If you’re going to write a twist ending, then try to leave it as late as you can: the last word or sentence in a piece of flash fiction, the last paragraph at least in a longer story or novel.
• Careful of (unintended) repetition. Words often overused include ‘all’, ‘now’, ‘very’ and ‘just’ (especially with ‘just in case’ where the ‘in case’ is sufficient). I recommend searching for them with a space either side so – for ‘just’ as an example, it doesn’t pick up ‘adjust’, ‘justice’ etc. I’d recommend only keeping the ones for emphasis or detract from the sentence if chopped, or changing to ‘only’ where appropriate. And the likes of ‘just’ can be swapped for ‘only’ where appropriate but better to chop so whatever you swap it for doesn’t get used too often either.
• We mumble / mutter / whisper under our breath so wouldn’t need ‘under my / his / her breath’ or to him/herself and to ourselves, so wouldn’t need him/herself.
• When speaking to someone and using a name, nickname or term of endearment (dear, love, pet*), generalisation (guys, ladies etc.), you’d need a comma before the name, i.e. ‘Do you know John?’ is asking if the person knows someone called John. ‘Do you know, John?’ means that the character is speaking to someone called John but asking them if they know something. A subtle difference but you want to avoid confusing the reader so they jump out of the story. If what’s said is very short, e.g. ‘Hi John’, then the comma’s not so important. * When it’s not a name it would usually be a small first letter.
• I strongly recommend you don’t invert dialogue tags as it’s not how we would naturally speak if talking aloud, e.g. changing ‘said Tony’ to ‘Tony said’. We wouldn’t say ‘said I’ so the same applies when there’s a name rather than ‘I’. ‘said’s do tend to blur into the background so don’t try too hard to choose something else, e.g. ‘Tony postulated’, even ‘Tony exclaimed’ could be too much if we already have the likes of ‘Get out!’. If a character isn’t named (e.g. ‘a/the wo/man’ then reversing is okay the first time.
• Where speech has an unrelated dialogue tag, e.g. someone laughing, moving, smiling, waving etc. (with it capitalised: He laughed. She picked up the mug. etc.) the punctuation should be a full stop rather than a comma so: He laughed. ‘Say that again.’. Had it been related description, it would be a comma: ‘Say that again,’ he said while fiddling with his tie. The rules are different (flexible) when the speech continues as the same sentence.
• Although grammatically correct, I recommend you don’t put commas between adjectives, especially where there is one or more comma elsewhere in the sentence. It slows the pace… really slows it where there are several and anything that slows what should be a fast-paced page-turning read is best avoided.
• I recommend not using capitals as it comes across as shouting. If a character is shouting then it’s perfectly fine to use exclamation marks but just one, with no full stop before or after it, and you’d often not need the ‘he / she shouted’ dialogue ‘tag’.