101-word stories and 50-second elevator speeches

On January 4th Boise Weekly published ten winners and judge’s picks from their 10th annual Fiction 101 contest. Those ten writers each managed to tell a unique story using only 101 words.

Coincidentally, on January 5th, Fred Miller blogged about non-fiction elevator speeches. If you speak at a reasonable rate of 120 words per minute, that 101-word limit corresponds to a 50-second speech. Fred described an extremely useful floor-by-floor approach that can work within 50 seconds, or longer as appropriate.  

Two years ago I blogged about elevator speeches, which I described as covering What do you do that can help me? You can find a much more detailed discussion in Terri L. Sjodin’s 2011 book, Small Message, Big Impact - How to Put the Power of the Elevator Speech Effect to Work for You. An excerpt is here on her blog.

A 50-second elevator speech is at one end of a class of very useful, brief presentation formats - which also include 100-second presentations, 200-second Presto presentations, 300-second Ignite presentations, and 400-second Pecha Kucha presentations.