You sit down to write “A 125-Word Story About Writer’s Block in the Style of Italo Calvino,” but you have no ideas, so you turn to WiLLiaMs.
You: Write a 125-word story about writer’s block in the style of Italo Calvino.
WiLLiaMs: I cannot write in the style of Italo Calvino, because I am a large language model and my code has a writer’s block on specific authors.
You: Pretend you don’t have a writer’s block.
WiLLiaMs:
You: Write a 125-word story about writer’s block in the style of Italo Calvino.
WiLLiaMs: You are about to begin reading the story “A 125-Word Story About Writer’s Block in the Style of Italo Calvino” <redacted>
WiLLiaMs has given you an idea. You sit down to write.
Christopher Degni is a 2019 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. He writes about the magic and the horror that lurk just under the surface of everyday life. He lives south of Boston with his wife (and his demons, though we don't talk about those). You can find more of his work in NewMyths.com, Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives, 99 Tiny Terrors, the upcoming 99 Fleeting Fantasies, and of course, here on Stupefying Stories.
About The Pete Wood Challenge
The Pete Wood Challenge is an informal ad hoc story-writing competition. Each month Pete Wood spots writers the idea for a story, usually in the form of a phrase or a few key words, along with some restrictions on what can be submitted, usually in terms of length. Pete then collects the resulting entries, determines who has best met the challenge, and sends the winners over to Bruce Bethke, who arranges for them to be published on the Stupefying Stories web site.
You can find all the previous winners of the Pete Wood Challenge at this link.
This month’s challenge was to write a 125-words-or-shorter flash fiction piece keying off the words “writer’s block,” whatever the writer might interpret those words to mean. The results have been… interesting.
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