April fools! Plot twists and/or surprising endings it is!
This often is a specialty of short stories and you find them there more often than in other forms of writing.
It's about time for you to try to write one.
The most famous examples I can think of aren't in literature, though.
I guess most of you have seen one or more of M. Night Shyamalan's movies: The Sixth Sense, The Village, Signs, The Happening or She's All That are perfect examples of a cool plot twist - usually in the end of the story/movie.
So this month I want you to write a story containing one (or more, but too many will make the reader feel like riding a roller coaster and not everybody likes them
) plot twists and/or a surprising ending.
Instead of an inspiring picture you get one of my own short stories, self-pubbed in an anthology called "Fictional Times - a Fabulous Anthology of Wondrous Stories" a few years ago. [/end shameless plug]
Spoiler for Hiden:
Last one standing
I am the last one of a dying race.
I don't know why I'm writing this down, since nobody will ever read it, but it keeps me occupied and I have to talk to somebody – even if it's my diary.
I'm old. Really old. If you think about it, somebody has to be the last one alive. I don't know why it had to be me, but that only adds to all the other things I don't know, so it's not bothering me much. I always knew that our own stupidity and not some meteors, or big earthquakes would erase us from this planet but I'm surprised about the way it happened. There were so many possibilities: Nuclear war, self-inflicted climate change, lab-made viruses... I'm sure there were even more dangers we brought upon ourselves, but I'm no scientist, not even a learned man, and everyone I could ask is dead.
What happened is quite simple. Since math was always a favorite of mine, I’d like to see it as an easy arithmetic: Take some businessmen who want to make a lot of money, add some mad scientists, subtract their conscience and multiply it with bad luck and quite some 'Oops, we didn't take that into account'. Done!
There's a simple plant with astonishing features: Bitterweed, a.k.a. Ambrosia artemisiifolia. I mentioned above that I'm not a learned man and I stand to that. But since you could say that this yellow-blossomed plant was our nemesis and our doom, everything concerning this plant is absolute basic knowledge. Anyways, back to my story. Once the earth got warmer, it spread like wildfire. And one single plant can release up to one billion pollen. That was a problem back then, because it was ultra allergen - six pollen per cubic meter air was enough to cause hay fever and Asthma and they flew hundreds of kilometers far. Sounds pretty frightening, eh? Of course science got it under control pretty fast, but once it did, no one bothered anymore to remove the plants. They soon were a common sight in most countries and only the yellow dust on the windows and roofs was annoying.
Now we take two scientists from our arithmetic above. They are, as mentioned, mad and without a conscience. One is a biologist and one a geneticist. Unfortunately they were employed at the worlds largest distributor of sperm (yeah, sounds pretty weird) and in vitro fertilization, a corporate group with sperm banks all over the world and as many clinics, which are specialized in IVF.
They already make a lot of money but apparently not enough. Every normally conceived child is costing them money, they think. And then they have their groundbreaking idea. Why not try to make mankind more dependent on our services? Sounds crazy, but that's what they did. They genetically modified that plant so that its pollen had a new property. You just had to inhale a few and they discharged to your upper respiratory tract, in addition to their normal psycho-active proteins, some others which made men, not all of them but enough, infertile.
It took us a few years to notice the slowly growing infertility and some more until the corporation's big secret leaked over the tubes. By then, it was too late. We already knew from plants like Corn or Rapeseed that it was impossible to protect normal plants from genetically modified plants and the new GMO Ambrosia spread over the world. Efforts were made to exterminate Ambrosia, but in vain.
What the mad scientists didn't take into account was their own storages running low after a while. Once it got out that fertile sperm was a limited resource, people panicked and what was left got destroyed in riots and wars.
And here I am. One of the last to hatch. Writing my story down and wondering if the next sentient and self-conscious beings on this planet will be wiser than we dinosaurs have been.
Rules:
1. This can be prose or a poem.
2. Must contain a plot twist and/or a surprising ending.
3. Prose must be 500-1500 words long.
4. Poetry must be 100-500 words long.
5. You will be disqualified if you exceed the limits, full stop. That's why they're called limits.
6. Your entry can't be published somewhere else before.
7. This is a writing contest, not a "I have written something like this ten years ago" contest. So if you happen to have a story that fits one of the themes, I'd like it to have a mayor overhaul/edit. Work for it.
8. Please add your story's word count and, if you have, your twitter handle.
9. Please put your story in [ spoiler ] tags to make the thread easier to handle.
You can find them above the smileys next to the 'youtube' symbol:
Entry will close May 1st 2015 and voting will begin somewhere around the same time too.
All members are eligible to join. If you are not a member you can join
here. Sign up is free and all are welcome!
The winner will have their piece displayed on the main Fantasy Faction website sometime in the next months.
Please post your entry
here.
Note: This thread is only for questions or discussing this month's writing contest. Good luck!
