Happy Ever After? What’s that all about, then? That, my friend, is Act 3 without the satisfying ending! We don’t do that here at Twisted 50, do we? No, we’re out to reimagine and reinvent the fairytale – warts and all. So, where does the prospective writer start when that blank page is staring them in the face, deliberately taunting them?
And how about that killer 2,000 words limit in which to write your masterpiece? That’s not an easy call, either. You’d better make sure those little suckers dance to your tune by run, skip and jumping off your page if you’re going to make your story to die for!
Now here comes the finger wagging moment: No descent into long, torrid streams of purple prose; no wrapping the text up in knots. You can’t have Constant Reader feeling like you’ve been sat at your keyboard knitting with bricks – forcing your story into unwieldy, clumsy and laborious lumps of text. No, Fellow Writers, we are determined to become the Masters of the Craft by plundering the dark side of our humanity, serving up second helpings of ‘Macabre à la Carte’ the only way we know how.
We’ve opened up our hearts, lungs, liver and brains – ripped the muse out of our still beating chest – just so that we can get our readers’ spines tingling, nerves jangling and their blood running icy cold.
So, I hope we’ve all enjoyed our sashay into the unknown and now – having released our inner demons onto an unsuspecting public – we can sit back, relax and reflect, safe in the knowledge that a story shared is a story halved, gored, dissected, severed, dismembered but never bored.
Amanda Webster.
Author of ‘The Horrors’ & ‘It’s The Small Things’ for Twisted 50 Vol. 2
