The international speed writing competition

The international speed writing competition had grown to monolithic proportions, popular all over the world with writers, aspiring writers and even non-writers. The concept of writing a story in a maximum of five minutes was universally popular.

Even people who usually said “I can’t write,” or “I don’t have any ideas,” were able to write something. Take away the time to come up with an idea and turn it into a workable story and suddenly everyone becomes a writer.

People entered in their millions, 4 million in total. It was the most popular competition ever. The only problem was finding a judge. With 4 million stories to read through it was going to be a time consuming project, even if the majority of those stories were very short (though the longest was over 17 pages).

Tony Blair had kindly agreed to make the final decision from the twelve short listed entries, which just meant that somebody was needed to whittle the list down from 4 million to twelve.

Nobody could be found to take on this thankless task, no matter how much money was offered.

It was decided to make the role more appetising by dividing the stories amongst twelve different judges, each of whom would choose one story. Though not ideal, as one judge might get two of the best stories in his or her selection, it was better than no judge at all.

However, even this didn’t work. With 333,333 stories to read each the post of judge still proved impossible to fill. The proposed number of judges was expanded again to 24, then to 48, then to 96. Still nobody came forward.

With 4 million contestants anxiously awaiting the result the judging had to go ahead, so it was decided to ask each of the entrants to rate the work of one of their rivals. Unfortunately, the contestants were all unwilling to make their competitor’s work highly and all 4 million entries came equal last.

An alternative approach was tried, everyone was allowed to mark their own work. This was more successful, in that everyone did incredibly well, the only downside being that everyone came joint first.

It simply proved impossible to choose the twelve best stories so the organisers had no choice but to ask Tony Blair to read all 4 million stories himself. Blair was forced to resign his middle east peacekeeper role and was tied up on the project for over a year, the period colloquially known as “The Year of Peace”, when warring factions all over the world came to a peaceful agreement.

Such was the success of the competition that it has been decided that Mr Blair will be asked to judge our new competition, ‘Every Story Ever Written’. Please send your entries in straight away.