Day 3 : Write a 100 word novel in a week!

Continuing the 'Write a 100 word novel in a week' competition at work.

Day 3.

Funt is running a 'Write a 100 word novel in a week' competition. Imagine if everyone in Republic wrote a novel - perhaps we'd end being famous for having more unpublished novelists in one place than anywhere else. So if you've always harboured a secret desire to get in the Guinness Book of Records, open up word and get typing. It's only a 100 words.

If you're worrying whether 100 words even count as a novel, well, author Umberto Eco considers El Dinosaurio ('The Dinosaur') a novel, and it's only got a rather pitiful word count of seven:

Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí.
("When he awoke, the dinosaur was still there.")

If that counts, we think we're safe with a hundred. And with a decent editor, who knows; maybe they can cut it back to a publishable length.

Those of you struggling with writers block should take heart from Hu Wenliang from China, who wrote nothing but five lines of punctuation and is waiting to hear whether it is the shortest novel ever. So if you've drawn a creative blank, try resting your forehead on your keyboard and you might come up with something on a par with Hu Wenliang. Just don't expect to be swanning off to Ibiza* on us: we'll be using Microsoft Word to check word counts, and it might object.


Funt - not waving, crowd surfing

*a holiday in Ibiza is a provisional prize and is subject to change. We're sure Jane will be fine with it, but, well, we haven't asked her yet, and we might have to fall back on something we can buy from the Red Shop for a fiver. But how much is a place in the Guinness Book Of Records worth? You can't buy that sort of publicity. Personally, I think you should save some of your holiday allocation. Maybe not the full 25 days, but a long weekend is probably a dead cert.

**Who knew: Roy Castle, famous for presenting the 'Record Breakers', used to have a wicker basket off camera into which he would dive and take refuge while presenting the program because he suffered from agoraphobia, and they filmed the program in one of the BBC's larger studios.