Mainly the contest is an exercise to inspire you and free your creativity! You don't have to be perfect, don't worry about the competition, relax and have fun. There's no problem if you cannot participate for one week: this pub is always open and the bartender is ready to offer you a pint of grog anytime!
The spirit of this initiative can be found in the Bananafish Manifesto, a document where we describe our values and our intention to create a relaxing and friendly community.
In this contest, I reward originality and plot. Absolute priority is given to an original content with the capability of engaging the reader and entertain through a well written short story.
The 500 words limit is suggested, yet it's part of the challenge. Nothing happens if your plot requires 550 words. For the way I am and feel like this environment should be, I choose to not be strict every time I can. Notwithstanding, please note that there's a specific intent behind this word's limit: privileging a fiction idea over descriptive parts in a short story format. Most of the time, being brief is more challenging than throwing yourself in a river of words. The more you'll trespass that limit, the more the story will have to be extraordinary to compensate and keep pace with the other participants' contributions.
Trying to guess the author's final is not considered a plus. This is not a "guess my final contest".
This format aims to create short stand-alone stories. We can always play with names and referrals if we feel like winking at the old-time participants. Trying to connect a story with other previous ones is a difficult and also worthless practice from a reward perspective (plus seldom engages the reader).
Still, from a competition pov, you may take any direction suggested by your creativity as long as the final result is not forced. In other words, if any reader takes the two parts of the story, mine and the participant's, and reads them together, she/he should find the whole piece entertaining.
This is a simple collaborative writing exercise with the outcome of a nice story. Nothing more and nothing less. If you don't feel like following any of the above guidelines, please feel free to join us for the fun of it and you'll be commented, upvoted, resteemed and appreciated even if you're out of the competition!
Every comment is welcome! May the potassium deity bless you all with many fruit-fish salads!
