#TitleTwisters – A new flash-fiction challenge

Welcome to #TitleTwisters

#TitleTwisters is a flash-fiction non-competitive exercise where the participants will write new stories based upon the possible permutations of rearranging the words of a selected story, book, movie or song title.  Here’s an example:

Back in 1980, science-fiction author Gene Wolfe publishedThe Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories.  The repetition was part of the book’s title, since the main story in the book was titled “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories.”  Other stories in the book included, “The Death of Doctor Island” and “The Death Island Doctor.”

Are you getting the picture?

The #TitleTwisters challenge is for you to write your own, completely original story based upon one of the other possible ways of twisting around the words of the prompt title, just as Gene Wolfe twisted “The Island of Doctor Death” to produce those other stories.

Obviously, not all titles lend themselves to such twisting.  The title must have enough words to be able to form multiple permutations and those other permutations must make some kind of sense.  With that in mind, #TitleTwisters is going to start out as running just once a month, so we don’t run out of reasonable prompts too soon.  Participants are more than welcome to post suggested titles as comments to this announcement

Here are the “rules” and other pertinent information:

1. 100-word minimum; no maximum.  The goal is not brevity, but maximum creativity with the use of the prompt.  That doesn’t imply “maximum volume,” but if you really ARE able to produce a whole novel and want to do so, I won’t hold you back.
2. No additional major words in the title.  “Minor words,” such as “the,” “a,” “an,” “of,” “with,” etc. may be omitted from or added to the title as needed to make sense, but no other words should be added..
3. Several possible permutations will be included with the prompt title, but if your story idea springs from a different rearrangement of the prompt title’s words, go for it.
4. Since the list of permutations for any given title is not endless, don’t worry if someone else has already posted a story based upon the same title that you’d like to use.  Just go ahead and write using the title permutation you wish to use.
5. The prompt will be issued on a Friday (just once a month, for now) and it would be great if you could post your stories by the following Wednesday, but it’s not critical.  Of course, the bulk of any traffic generated by this challenge (if it catches on) will probably be on that Wednesday, so take that into consideration.
6. If you have your own blog (or other online location for your text), post the story there and post a link to it in the comments for the prompt.  If you don’t have a blog, go ahead and post the whole story as a comment.
7. As you visit the blogs of other participants, remember to post the link to your story there, as well, in case somebody reads their story without having been to the prompt page, yet.
8. This is NOT a judged, competitive challenge – just a friendly way to have some writerly fun.  You may even submit more than one entry, if you feel so inclined.

This post is just the instructions.  The prompts will be separate posts, so I’ll be closing comments for this post to make sure people comment in the right place.

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