Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

Flash Fiction Challenge: It’s ABC Meets XYZ!

Last week’s challenge: “Choose Your Random Words“

So, this week’s challenge is going to be awesome.

SHUT UP IT WILL TOO.

Here’s what’s going to happen.

I’m going to list 20 different pop culture properties — books, movies, comics.

You’re going to randomly choose two and mash them up into a piece of ~1000-word flash fiction.

Here’s why — because whenever I read reviews of my books or whenever you pitch a film to somebody you always mash up two wildly different properties to give a feel for what it is. (As I’ve noted elsewhere, Blue Blazes often gets called Goodfellas meets Lovecraft meets The D&D Monster Manual.) It’s a fun way to envision a story, so boom, that’s what we’re doing here.

Note: the result should be thematic and stylistic, not actual mash-up fanfiction. (Again, envision you take your story into a pitch meeting and to pitch it, you combine two seemingly unlike pop culture properties. It’s like that.)

Story due by Friday, June 14th, noon EST.

Post at your online space. Link back here.

Here’s the list. Choose two or pick ’em randomly with a d20 or random number generator.

  1. Casablanca
  2. Die Hard
  3. Breaking Bad
  4. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
  5. The Maltese Falcon
  6. Terminator
  7. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
  8. Star Wars
  9. Game of Thrones
  10. The Handmaid’s Tale
  11. Batman
  12. The Stand
  13. Neverwhere
  14. The Godfather
  15. Planet of the Apes
  16. Rosemary’s Baby
  17. Arrested Development
  18. The Walking Dead
  19. Reservoir Dogs
  20. Pride & Prejudice

terribleminds

131 responses to “Flash Fiction Challenge: It’s ABC Meets XYZ!”

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  4. The mysteries of the d20 gave me “Die Hard” and “Reservoir Dogs.” I don’t exactly know how the resulting twist here came about at the end, but I did enjoy the sideways reference to another one of my favorite movies (a list on which both Die Hard and Reservoir Dogs appear), “The Big Lebowski.”

    Bodies

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