Write half a story while drinking IPAs. Go to sleep. Wake up next day and study scrawled words on page. Realize you have no clue what the hell it means.
Realize after a few beers that adjectives and adverbs really, truly have no boundaries and have roared, plowed, blasted across the overwrought page. The stench of wildflowers and highways are embedded in their bones.
Look at Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules again. Start weeding.
Find three or four neighborly sentences. Put them side-by-side. Move them around until rain pelts the desert. Realize they have long been estranged for good reason. Erase.
Editor’s Note: Meg’s entry is exactly 100 words long.
Meg Tuite‘s writing has appeared in numerous journals. She has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. She is fiction editor of The Santa Fe Literary Review and Connotation Press, author of Domestic Apparition (2011) San Francisco Bay Press, Disparate Pathos (2012) Monkey Puzzle Press, Reverberations (2012) Deadly Chaps Press, Bound By Blue (2013) Sententia Books, Her Skin is a Costume (2013) RedBird Chaps and Bare Bulbs Swinging (2014) Artistically Declined Press. Her blog: http://megtuite.wordpress.com.