Wrote a 3,500 word short story for a competition I think I can win

>wrote a 3,500 word short story for a competition I think I can win
>re-read the submission guidelines
>it's actually a 2,500 word limit

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Delete the first and last 500 words. You should be doing this with everything you write anyway.

But then he'd have 3000 words

delete the last 1000 and conclude with the antagonist waking up, realizing it was all a dream

>antagonist
kill myself

No way. My opening line and paragraph is killer, and the final paragraph essentially concludes all the loose threads in the story. Would you tell Joyce to delete the final passage from that story where he talks about it snowing in the end? No way.

delete a thousand spaces between words and call it an avant piece

Kill your darlings and all that. Ambiguity is king, don't wrap up shit.

And I actually hate that Joyce line desu.

OP here. In 30 minutes I have it down to 3,000 words and it's still a great story. This is actually a great way of forcing yourself (myself) to find superfluous material and tighten things up.

I don't believe in "kill your darlings" as an M.O. If it's a matter of "Kill your darlings or lose the work as a whole" then fine, but actively seeking out my best lines for deletion is just masochistic. I've already deleted a passage and several sentences that were extremely funny and / or extremely profound. Thanks for reading.

That's not what kill your babies means. You're not supposed to kill your best work, it's telling you that just because you like it doesn't mean you should leave it in.

You're assuming everything you make is good; let your success this far prove it isn't

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OP here. I'm at 2,758 now. Wish me luck!

>You're assuming everything you make is good

I am because it is.

just do it, my man
but keep a copy of the original 3500 words story

I have a copy of the original, but the sad thing is the best version of the story is somewhere in between, but now I only have the original and the parred down version. I may actually expand the original version into a novella (~30k words) since there's enough detail for that I believe.

2690 words now.

Almost there!

that sucks OP

similar story
>submit first short story to a magazine a little while ago.
>look over the file i sent after submitting it.
>forgot one # to indicate a line-skip
probably won't matter but i was really disappointed in myself for fucking up something like that.

Still waiting to hear back

OP, what is your terrible story even about?

2, 654!

It's about a narcissist who lies to his colleagues that his imaginary fiance is pregnant and is forced to spend his evenings at a library researching the gestation period and its effects on a mother-to-be despite struggling to sleep thanks to a new road development outside his apartment and despite being distracted by a girl at the library who turns out to be way different from how he spent so much time imagining her to be.

This much in 2500 words? Damn, son, kill some darlings. It's gonna be cluttered as hell.

Please DON'T bully!

It's over nine months and is told by the narrator on the night before he is forced to go to work and get outed as a fraud since his wife was due. And yeah it's a lot I guess but there's enough substance there I think, and it's not as if each theme isn't linked anyway.

>"Please DON'T bully!" upon constructive criticism
sage

Was trying to be constructive in Veeky Forums's own tone, sorry. But yeah, I definitely feel that's probably too much for something so short. If I had only heard your description of it I'd've assumed it to be at least 20k words.

sounds pretty good teebeehache

don't listen to all the "murder ur darlin" shit in this thread. modern writing advice does nothing but advocate that everyone sound like hemingway or carver. writing classes are fucking cancer these days

I like the idea. Post it if you get rejected or decide not to submit after all.

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Holy... I want more