₦airaland Forum

everrichy: I have been following this thread since the very hour Zuby started it.
I read every post just as any other person following but I don't comment.

However, it has become very unbearable for me seeing all these people derailing the thread with useless comments, unnecessary arguments, quarrels, name-calling and abuse of all kinds.

Therefore, I have this to say to as many people in this thread who has ever quarrelled with another person......

You are all fools.
You are all stupid.
You are all jobless.
You are all mad.
You are all a disgrace to yourselves and whatever you represent.
You are all ignorant.

I'll wait for the first FOOL restless enough to quote this post.

Omolola1: Hello writers,

I'm honoured to be part of the judges. I only got to know about this thread recently.


Writing short stories means beginning as close to the conclusion as possible, and grabbing the reader in the very first moments.

Here are a few tips:

- Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
- Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
- Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
- Start as close to the end as possible.
- Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
- Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
- Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Write a Catchy Short Paragraph

In today’s fast-moving world, the first sentence of your short story should catch your reader’s attention with the unusual, the unexpected, an action, or a conflict. Begin with tension and immediacy. Remember that short stories need to start close to their end.

Example: "I heard my neighbor through the wall"
(Dry and uninteresting)

"The neighbor behind us practiced scream therapy in his shower almost every day"

The second sentence catches the reader’s attention. Who is this guy who goes in his shower every day and screams? Why does he do that? What, exactly, is“scream therapy”? Let’s keep reading…

Developing Characters
In order to develop a living, breathing, multi-faceted character, it is important to know way more about the character than you will ever use in the story. Here is a partial list of character details to help you get started.
Name
Age
Job
Ethnicity
Appearance
Residence
Pets
Religion
Hobbies
Single or married?
Children?
Temperament
Favorite color
Friends
Favorite foods
Drinking patterns
Phobias
Faults
Something hated?
Secrets?
Strong memories?
Any illnesses?
Nervous gestures?
Sleep patterns
Imagining all these details will help you get to know your character, but your reader probably won’t need to know much more than the most important things in four areas:
Appearance: Gives your reader a visual understanding of the character.
Action: Show the reader what kind of person your character is, by describing actions rather than simply listing adjectives.
Speech: Develop the character as a person — don’t merely have your character announce important plot details.
Thought: Bring the reader into your character’s mind, to show them your character’s unexpressed memories, fears, and hopes.

Choose a Point of View
Point of view is the narration of the story from the perspective of first, second, or third person. As a writer, you need to determine who is going to tell the story and how much information is available for the narrator to reveal in the short story. The narrator can be directly involved in the action subjectively, or the narrator might only report the action objectively.

Write Meaningful Dialogue
Each speaker gets his/her own paragraph, and the paragraph includes whatever you wish to say about what the character is doing when speaking.

Set Up The Plot
Plot is what happens, the storyline, the action.

Create Conflicts and Tension
Conflict produces tension that makes the story begin. Tension is created by opposition between the character or characters and internal or external forces or conditions. By balancing the opposing forces of the conflict, you keep readers glued to the pages wondering how the story will end.

Find a Resolution
The solution to the conflict. In short fiction, it is difficult to provide a complete resolution and you often need to just show that characters are beginning to change in some way or starting to see things differently.

If I were you, I'd take note of the above, because that is what I, Omolola would be looking out for.

All the best!

plainmirror: Guy seriously Ʊ 4 kukuma cari dis U̶̲̥̅̊я dry pics joke go comedy section eeehh!
Ʊ wan turn dis thread to a tribal warfront?
As for U̶̲̥̅̊я poems bro believe me it is BULLSHIT. Lacks rhymes $ rythm, always offpoint and nothin to decode frm it .