233. The Best Stories you Wrote

winners of last week's tiny story contest

Dear reader,

Writing a tiny story for a tiny person is a way to give life to a thing of mere ink and lines. Such is the power of stories. In this week’s post, my favourite entries from last week’s tiny story contest. Read all the wonderful tiny stories here.

The SneakyArt Post is a publication of secretly drawn art of the world. Every week, I share the latest drawings from my sketchbooks and the best ideas from my journey as an artist and writer.

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It begins with seeing. A tiny person crosses my path. For a short time, their big world intersects with mine. The drawing begins and ends inside that brief intersection of time and space. A whole person reduced to a few lines of ink. Their multidimensional reality filtered to two dimensions on paper.

Then, you see the tiny drawing. Then, you write for them a tiny story. And suddenly the tiny person is alive again. As a person of your world, with a story of your creation, the thing of ink and lines is resurrected to a complex, profound, rich existence. What is this if not magic?

This is the pact between us - artist and viewer. I want to thank every tiny story writer who participated in last week’s contest. Below are my favourite entries. If you see your story here, email me your mailing address. You have won a tiny drawing!

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Mother: Thank you for getting me out of there.

Daughter: What was it is this time? Was it Craig? Delilah? The cat?

Mother: The room felt too…tight. Like the darkness was closing in.

Daughter: Thank you for calling me. Do you want to talk about finding a new apartment? Or do you just want to breathe?

Mother: I think I just want to be with the pink park flowers and with you. I’ll be ok. The room isn’t always tight. It isn’t always dark.

Daughter: *stands next to a giant bush full of pink blossoms*

Mother: *takes out a sketch book and starts drawing her daughter and the flowers*

- by Wake Lloire of Whimsical Writing with Wake

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He looked away from her. The sun warmed his thighs and the bench insulted one particular vertebrae. They'd come here to talk away from the children.

Sheila sat too close for what she was saying. That it wasn't working. That she wasn't happy. She droned on and on, being diplomatic, while the sun shone and the birds chirped and he knew she would be leaving him in that blunt polite way of hers. He pictured himself taking his visits with the kids here in this very park.

He agreed with her. She pulled her long hair to one side. He pulled his hat down to shade his eyes. It was very bright. The day had made everything clear.

- by JM Hill of Driven Writer

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Max was well aware of the thin leash between him and Kevin - it seemed such a vulnerable connection in a big wide world full of things he did not quite understand.

"Where are we going?" Max asked, trying not to sound too anxious.

"Don't worry, I got you," Kevin said, as he trotted briskly towards his favourite garbage bin, excited by the smells of park and grass and rubbish and other dogs.

- by Margreet de Heer of Margreet’s Comics

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Let us make this a summer to write stories. The next tiny story contest is in just a couple of weeks!

In case you missed it:

🤳🏼 I wrote about how social media colonizes our minds and makes us jump through artificial hoops that generate money for mega-corporations at the cost of our humanity.

👋🏼 I reintroduce SneakyArt and the story of how I accidentally became an artist.

🤖 Why AI-generated content can never be art and the end goal of parasitic plutocrats.

⏳ A drawing does not capture a moment in time, it is a timelapse on a piece of paper.

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