Write, Rate and Read Very Short Stories

Writers are often looking for unbiased feedback of their work from fair and balanced third-party sources. To say that the rise of the Internet has ushered in a new generation of writers is an understatement.

If you enjoy reading and writing fiction, in the form of short stories, Ficly.com is a site for you.

This good looking site allows registered users to post brief stories – no more that 1,024 characters. Community members can then rate the story and even write a prequel or a sequel. Stories can be tagged by both sides.

Less than two weeks into beta and this site shows serious promise.

Ficly allows you to sign in with Google, Yahoo, Facebook or OpenID, so there’s no need to remember a new set of login requirements.

There are also writing challenges. For example, the current contest:

Write a segment or two detailing a measure taken by society to restrain the creative and intelligent. Make it outlandish, make it subtle; tell it from a general perspective, or tell it from a personal point of view. Do whatever works.

Each story gets its own feed so you can follow the activity as writers from around the world build on each others work.

Here’s a quick example that I posted just to give you an idea.

A Plastic Pause

It’s not the best sample because what I posted is simple an excerpt from a larger story. The site works best when you post a complete story that is approximately 1,000 characters long.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.