I wrote this orginally for the bathshortstoryaward.co.uk in 2014 and I’m bringing it out again for the summer holidays. Choose your favourite diet and have a good writing week. Or just stuff everything into your first draft…
The 5:2 diet – Write as much as you can for five days and even include soft, sugary prose. On the other two days, restrict yourself to 500 lean words.
The Dukan diet – Is there enough meat in your story? Add more, even if it feels bad.
The Paleo diet – Be a writing caveman! Hunt out those predatory adverbs, fish for cliches. Don’t over process your writing.
Weight watchers – Use a points system to restrict your fat and flabby words.
The Cambridge Diet – This is a very low adjective diet. Only add more if your piece looks starved.
Slimming World – Balance and vary your prose portions
SlimFast – a diet for sci-fi writers. Replace all items of real food in your story with something virtual and scary.
The Cabbage Soup diet (unfashionable). Only write stories about cabbage.