Challenge

I'm not necessarily a fan of writing 'gimmicks' because there are times when the style overpowers the substance of the story or rather, takes the place of a plot. I do think, however, changing things up and trying something new every now and then to get a fresh idea of character, or setting or plot. So with that in mind, here are some 'gimmicks' I've tried in the past. Note, these are fanfics as my original stories are no longer available online:

• Pronoun-only story -- this was atrociously hard to do and thank goodness I had one male character and one female, because I didn't use their names a single time during the course of the story. This is not a challenge I'd repeat.
  
• The 'backwards story' -- Start at the ending and work your way to the beginning. Now this was a lot of fun to write, but very difficult as well. The story has to be able to flow in both directions, and the ending -- which is essentially the beginning -- has to hold the truth the rest of the story has been building up to. This is a technique I'd like to try again.
  
• The second person -- This is one I see a lot of, and while I've moved away from the second person as a form of storytelling, I think it can be very effective in certain situations -- when the narrator wants to put distance between himself and the events going on in the story. Once you get over the weirdness of the perspective, it's a pretty straight-forward device.
  
• First person, present tense -- I was once told that writing first person/present tense was a big 'no no' and should never, ever be attempted unless your name was, say, Hemmingway. But I've never met a writing no no I didn't want to challenge, and so I had a go at it and had a great time writing this. I'm not so fond of present tense anymore, but I do still like the first person a lot.
  
• Alternating first person narrative -- Two different narrators, first person, present tense. This was a lazy way of getting into two and then later, four, characters' heads. This way, I was able to shift geography, time spans, and character emotions without giving the reader whip-lash. At least, that's what I hope I accomplished!
  
• Spam Poem -- Like all of you, I get a ridiculous amount of spam, and I figured I'd put it to good use. Every line in this poem is honest to God taken from a spam letter I actually received. I might have fiddled a bit with a couple of words, but nothing major -- I tried to preserve the beauty of the original spam (g). I'm sure some of you may recognize some of the lines included.
  
• Imitating a famous author's 'voice' -- This is another one that I tried, and don't have any intention of doing again. I enjoy Jane Austen and have read all of her novels several times, but even so, I found this incredibly difficult -- Austen is Austen for a reason. Still, it was fun and a challenge to imitate another author quite frequently gets you to focus on details and nuances that otherwise you might have missed.
  
• The 100-word story -- I'm not terribly fond of drabbles, because they seem to be everywhere, but it's a good writing excercise. How much 'story' can you fit into just 100 words? Writing 100 words is easy; making it make sense and have a beginning, middle and end is a lot harder.
  
• Lori's Evil Challenge -- Because it's well-known among the Mod Squaders that I love, love challenges, Lori gave me this one: write a story in which one character's dialogue has to be taken completely from a song. That's right, somehow one person has to speak in lyrics, the other person can talk normally, and oh my gosh, somehow it all has to make sense. It was evil, but I did it, not once, but twice, and there are a bunch of other Lori's Evil Challenge stories floating around.

I've answered a lot of other challenges over the years, but many of them have to do with song lyrics or Shakespeare or incorporate this element into a story or are less strange than the ones I pointed out above. I've also heard of 'all dialogue' challenges, though I've never tried it myself; hmmm, maybe that should be next on my list? So, what about you? What's the best (most evil?) challenge you've ever come across? Original fic challenges, if you've done them, count as well.