If you’re not familiar, there’s a writing prompt on Twitter for the writing community with the hashtag vss365. The “vss” stands for “very short story,” and the number is self-explanatory. Each month, a new Twitter user is tasked with posting a new word each day to prompt people. With the 280 characters available in a Tweet, a user has to come up with a story of some sort incorporating the posted word-of-the-day, although because you need to include the hashtag, the story itself is typically 273 characters (if you try to be exact, at least).
It also doesn’t necessarily have to be a story. Some play around with the form and structure by doing poetry or a haiku or whatever else.
For Oct. 9, the prompt word is “because.”
Here is my entry:
Justin was asleep under city lights that never seemed to blink when blue flashes danced naked on his tent. He sat up for two badges who poked their heads in. Time to go, they said, move it along. Justin must’ve missed the usual notice. Why, he said. #Because, they said. #vss365
[I will note, I wrote this story as fiction, but it’s something that regularly (check Google, hundreds of examples) happens, and in this exact way, in fact, where they awake you sleeping in a tent and tell you to move along.]
Milam's Musings 