Sat, Oct 19, 7:40 PM CDT

2023 Writers Contest 3rd Place Winner - Blank by 3dcheapskate

Jun 16, 2023 at 11:45 am by gToon


This is the complete text of the 3rd place entry in the 2023 Writers Contest - Blank by 3dcheapskate. The writer also created an excellent illustration for the story. The word count is 446; the hours spent working on the story and illustration is 2. 3dcheapskate had this to say about "Blank":
 

inspiration - have you ever sat in front of a blank white sheet of paper? I was going to have him write a sentence, cross it out, and then have a detailed description of all the doodling, ending with the famous author writing the first line of his most famous novel. But I got bored. An alternative ending after all the doodling was to have the 'artist' signing his name and thinking "That'll make it worth $10,000,000")

(the 2 hours spent is an estimate of the sum of all the individual minutes spent writing down phrases on scraps of paper as they came to mind, assembling all those scraps into some sort of coherent order on a larger sheet of paper, annotating that (i.e. drawing lots of arrows and crossing a lot out), repeating a couple of times, until I got to the point at which I decided that I'm getting bored. Et voila! (I know - they were out of cellos))

(Notepad++ for the words, GIMP for the picture)

He sat dead still, afraid to move. How long had he been sitting like this ? The pale creature was lying motionless in front of him. Its skin was almost featureless, a flat expanse of pristine whiteness. Even though he couldn't see its eyes he knew that it was watching him intently. He'd crossed paths with its kin before, many times and it always terrified him. He could sense a slow breathing; a slight fluttering along its extremities, first one side, then the other. He felt the sweat forming around his collar.

"Do I make you nervous?" The voice pierced straight into the recesses of his mind without any disturbance to the air between them. His right hand tightened its grip on the implement he was going to use to silence it. He slowly, apprehensively, reached out his left hand and gently placed his spread fingers on the thing.

"Don't touch me!" His hand shot back as if stung. The creature chuckled softly inside his head, condescendingly. "You're pathetic." He took a deep breath and reached out again, more aggressively, pinning the creature. He looked up and closed his eyes for a moment, silently mouthing something. A smile drew across his face, and he raised his right hand to strike.

"Go on then," it sneered, "write something. I know it'll be rubbish."

 

Sections: Community

Comments

The author's anguish...The beginning is always the hardest...This short piece captures all the emotions well
I was wondering whether the "flat expanse of pristine whiteness" might be too obvious and give away the twist (if you can call it that)... Silly me !
And I've just noticed that they've corrected a deliberate spelling mistake in the stuff-at-the-start-that-was-at-the-end. It should NOT be "Et voila!" (and I'm not talking missing graves) as the original "Et viola!" was correct, although my first choice was obviously "Et cello!"
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