One hundred seems perfect. It\u2019s the basis of percentages, the perfect test score, the boiling point of water (Celsius), purity. Pythagoreans considered 100 as divine because it is the square (10 x 10) of the divine decad (10). Even a Scrabble set has 100 tiles.<\/p>\n
And yet 100 is a fragment. It\u2019s an arbitrary marker, like the \u201cFirst 100 Days\u201d of a president\u2019s term\u2014merely a promise of what\u2019s to come, or a whiff of what has passed.<\/p>\n
The whole is a part and the part is a whole. The 100-word format forces the writer to question each word, to reckon with Flaubert\u2019s mot juste in a way that even most flash fiction doesn\u2019t. At the same time the brevity of the form allows the writer \u201cto keep a story free from explanation,\u201d as Walter Benjamin wrote. For life doesn\u2019t lend itself so easily to our elucidations. \u201cIncoherence is preferable to a distorting order,\u201d said Roland Barthes. None of us will ever know the whole story in other words. We can only collect a bag full of shards that each seem perfect.<\/p>\n
100 words for your story … no more or no less. Tell a story, write a prose poem, pen a slice of your memoir, or try your hand at an essay.<\/p>\n
You get 100 words\u2014exactly 100 words<\/em>\u2014which is both the pain and the pleasure here. It’s short, you tell yourself. You could write 100 words at a bus stop, on your lunch break, in your sleep. But with 100 words you must tell the whole story in its entirety, so it holds together like a perfect little doll house. (Your title is not part of the 100 words.)<\/p>\n Please include a short bio\u00a0<\/strong>(25 words, max!)\u00a0with your submission. Also, did we say exactly 100 words? We weren’t kidding! Also, make friends with your spell-check, or have a friend proofread your story.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 100 words for your story … no more or no less. Tell a story, write a prose poem, pen a slice of your memoir, or try your hand at an essay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"_tribe_events_status":"","_tribe_events_status_reason":"","footnotes":"","_tec_slr_enabled":"","_tec_slr_layout":""},"tags":[],"tribe_events_cat":[2],"class_list":["post-1532","tribe_events","type-tribe_events","status-publish","hentry","tribe_events_cat-call-for-submission","cat_call-for-submission"],"ticketed":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anovelapproach.ca\/submission_calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/1532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anovelapproach.ca\/submission_calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anovelapproach.ca\/submission_calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/tribe_events"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anovelapproach.ca\/submission_calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/anovelapproach.ca\/submission_calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/1532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1538,"href":"https:\/\/anovelapproach.ca\/submission_calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/1532\/revisions\/1538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anovelapproach.ca\/submission_calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anovelapproach.ca\/submission_calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1532"},{"taxonomy":"tribe_events_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anovelapproach.ca\/submission_calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events_cat?post=1532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}