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Center your story around a struggling author who discovers they can control reality through their writing — but there’s a catch.

Posted in Dramatic on Jul 4, 2025

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✍️ 68 stories

The Inherited Sentence

Submitted to Contest #310

The midday sun scorched the ancient stones of Dubrovnik's Old Town as Eva Perković dragged her suitcase down a narrow alleyway off Stradun. Her sandals slapped against uneven flagstones, her shoulder ached from her laptop bag, and sweat rolled freely down her back."This is it," she muttered to herself, stopping in front of a modest stone building with wooden shutters painted sea blue.It had taken her years — and the complete meltdown of her life — to get here.Once a rising star in the Croatian literary world, Eva had published a debut novel ...

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It is Written

Submitted to Contest #310

“Write it,” Casey said. “Deadline’s midnight.”“But boss, once I write it, it goes to print. And then, there’s no going back,” I said.“What’s the problem, Gordy?”“It’s just the finality of it all. This man’s going to wake up. His wife will hear. His colleagues. There’s no walking that back,” I said. “He isn’t even the big bad.”“He’ll still have a choice. That’s how this works.”“I don’t know if he does, boss. They mean to kill him.”“Peter’s living large in an Upper East Side tower, paid for with stolen retirements. No minimizing it. He’s fundi...

29 likes 19 comments 19
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I Already Know The Title

Submitted to Contest #310

Content Warning: This story contains graphic violence, gore and psychological horror which some readers may find disturbing. I stare at the back of her head, urging her hair to go up in flames - the smug bitch. I take a sip of my coffee without averting my gaze. She sits taking selfies with an obnoxious cup of something - a Frankenstein coffee. It took her ridiculously long to order the concoction, and she was downright nasty to the poor staff; threatening to post about the slow service to her thousands of followers. And then, had the audaci...

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Ctrl+Alt+Delete

Submitted to Contest #310

He hadn’t written for years and now led a quiet, somewhat grumpy life in Chiang Mai. Once mildly famous for a debut novel in the ‘80s, he’d since produced nothing but half-finished drafts and the occasional smug email. As a 68-year-old (but only ever admitting to 55), he lived in Chiang Mai, a small city in northern Thailand. Popular with tourists, there was something exciting happening nearly every night of the week. So, his limited writing skills, such as they were, didn’t bother him - as long as his royalty cheque kept arriving. Whenever ...

21 likes 9 comments 9
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The Type Writer's Dillema

Submitted to Contest #310

Content warning: This story contains violence, traumatic references, and mental-health themesAs I sit on the ground, surrounded by falling fire, ash, and thundering skies, I realize that I have a problem that I can fix. The events surrounding the biggest disaster of 2025 in Montivillaton were a little garbled in my mind because of all the hospital visits, but I knew it had to do with that damned type-writer.This all started three weeks ago. What do orange juice, computers, and a struggling author have in common? My mother. She was always bus...

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Redactions

Submitted to Contest #310

Dr. Greg McIver has an awful lot of things he’s been putting off. Situation normal, he would say, except that it’s a bit worse than usual. He would win Olympic gold if running away from your problems was a sport. Forrest, his long-suffering best friend and seasoned anthropology professor, has got it into his head that Greg ought to write up some kind of academic memoir. Greg's experiences are compelling, Forrest had said. And informative, too. He didn’t specify how.“You take notes, don't you?” Forrest had asked, long ago. “About important th...

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Draft 27

Submitted to Contest #310

I enlarged the font and reread the last paragraph. “Melody closed her eyes and inhaled the warmth of Jeremy’s breath on her cold face. Trudging in the snow, checking on sheep out to pasture was not her idea of a good time. But there was something about Jeremy–maybe the twinkle in his eye, or his wry, Irish sense of humor that made her follow him anywhere. Especially when they stopped to warm up in each other’s arms.” Then I quickly reduced it again and wanted to hurl. That story wasn’t going anywhere. Just like my previous twenty-five...

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The Little Key

Submitted to Contest #310

Maya stared at the rejection email until the words blurred together. "While your fairy tales show promise, they lack the commercial appeal our readers expect. We encourage you to consider more mainstream genres."She closed her laptop and walked to the window of her cramped studio apartment. Three years of writing, two dozen rejections, and a bank account that mocked her dreams with its single digits. Her mother's voice echoed in her mind: "Maybe it's time to get a real job, sweetheart."Outside, the city hummed with the lives of people who ha...

14 likes 4 comments 4
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Provincetown

Submitted to Contest #310

The Memoir ‘You’d do well with a memoir,’ Cyn, her agent, said – was it thoughtfully, or desperately? Memoir sells, these days. And I’m sure you’d find a lot to write about.’ ‘It’s so not my thing, Cyn.’ If Cynthis Booth was not her best friend, she wouldn’t have an agent, and they both knew it. But going back into the wilderness of the past, the chaos and the wild beasts lurking everywhere – how could she? She couldn’t. ‘Well, think about it,’ Cyn said with a brave smile. ‘We’ll talk again soon.’ ‘Thanks, Cyn,’ she sloped out, anothe...

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An Accidental Killer

Submitted to Contest #310

Sensitive content: Unexpected death I had to win that stupid fifth grade writing contest. “When she’s a famous author, she’ll buy us a mansion to grow old in!” My parents are wildly delusional dreamers. No pressure. Luckily, I have other skills that pay my bills while I pursue the ever-elusive publishing contract. But let me be clear about one thing: I never set out to be a serial killer. That's not the skill that pays my bills. I’m more of an accidental killer. But people died just the same. To be fair, these people had it coming. Let me ex...

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The Book of Life

Submitted to Contest #310

Content Note: This story contains themes of loss, a fatal accident, and emotional trauma. This place feels familiar, though I cannot say from where. Perhaps I’ve been here before. Or perhaps I return again and again—unable, or unwilling, to remember.What lingers is not an image, but a sensation. The feeling of homecoming. Of something long-awaited, drawing gently to its end. I sense I’ve been led here before, though the memory dissolves at the edges, like ink in water. A faint scent of old parchment drifts through the air, unmoored from time...

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The Giant

Submitted to Contest #310

What if the solar systems were atoms and the universe was actually the combination of many such atoms which created individual cells of a Giant? What if the stars were the powerhouses, the nuclei? So what would that make us? Energy from our sun or a star, in general, came from a chain of fusion reactions of Hydrogen atoms - the smallest elemental atom of the universe. So does this mean we are really living inside life? Thus thought Doris. She was a chemist, who had read about the rudimentary basics of chemistry and now lived as a chemist in ...

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Draft Zero

Submitted to Contest #310

The mold above Rae's bed looked like Texas. It had been growing since February, a slow spread of shadow that didn’t flinch at bleach or begging. She stared at it most nights while the building groaned around her, listening to the baseboards creak and the radiator sigh like an old man too tired to argue.Her laptop balanced on her knees, humming its tired fan-whine. The Word doc was blank except for the blinking cursor, like a pulse that never stopped waiting. She hadn’t written anything real in months. Just invoices. Outlines. One commissione...

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The Prompt Generator

Submitted to Contest #310

Ever since his first book's modest success a year ago—though it already felt immensely remote—Marcus had been chasing another win, if not something bigger. He was currently sitting across his agent, Melanie, who was unconsciously indulging in her most noticeable personal tic—placing the tips of all her fingers together and idly contorting them in every possible shape—as she contemplated her thoughts on his latest draft. Marcus found the habit irritating, verging on loathsome—not so much for what it was, but because it was a tell that she hat...

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Black Star

Submitted to Contest #310

The sun is not long for this world.Inside its wrathful heart is an incomprehensible population of our most basic element. They all move with conviction. They have no objective except collision. When they do, the union explodes with fiery passion that hurtles light and heat across the void and sets a gentle kiss upon the brow of our earth. At its current size and mass, our star contains about ten octodecillion hydrogen atoms. That’s ten, followed by fifty-seven zeros.By my written decree, it now has two hundred and sixteen thousand duodecilli...

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