THE WRITERS ARENA--DAY ONE

THE PROMPT

Back in May, at Comic Con, I met some people running a booth promoting something called The Writers Arena. Last month I submitted my short story “The Soldier Undreams” as a sample of my writing and they accepted me as a participant. Today I got my writing prompt:


Welcome writers, to the prompt for your arena battle. It has been said that good things come in small packages, and this week we're going to see just how true that is. Your goal is to write us a story which features miniaturization; we want you to make something really small. This concept is older than one might think. Books like Gulliver's Travels and tales like Jack and the Beanstalk, while not technically shrinking anything, definitely put the hero into a world where everything was massive, thereby making the hero tiny. However, when the genre of science fiction came along things became a bit more straightforward and tales with shrinking devices started popping up. A medical crew was shrunk down to operate on a patient in The Fantastic Voyage, radiation made a nice scapegoat for someone shrinking in The Incredible Shrinking Man, and recently Ant-Man has become a mainstream superhero by donning a shrinking suit.

Your task is to write a story where something gets made tiny. The genre, reasons for shrinking, and setting of the story are up to you. Just get to shrinking.

You have 4,000 words. A first draft of your story is due on Wednesday, July 29th. Upon meeting that deadline you may submit a rewrite on Monday, August 3rd.