Ever been part of an unforgettably bad family vacation? We're you regulated to your corner of the backseat during a 2,000 mile tour of America's Southwest? Did you spend more time traveling to the location, than at your actual vacation destination? Do you cry when you hear "Holiday Road" by Lindsey Buckingham?
If you said "yes" to any of those, then the Boys want to hear about it!
It's Bob & Brian's Vacation Stories! Just send us your road-tripping-truck-stopping-turn-this-car-around story in 75 words or less (DO NOT use the phrase "needless to say").
If we read your story over-the-air you'll qualify for the Grand Prize: an HD camcorder from American, 20 rounds of golf to Rivermoor Golf Club, and a Prize Pack from the Milwaukee County Zoo!
NEW -> BRIAN'S 10 (PLUS 1) COMMANDMENTS OF STORYWRITING
1. The phrase "Needless to say" has been out-lawed by this program long ago. For some reason, if left unchecked, its use becomes nearly universal. If every letter we read on the air set up the punchline with the phrase, "Needless to say", that would become a huge irritant and you would barf. Needless to say, that would be no good.
2. Don't tell me that you're going to tell me a great story. First of all, there's a word limit and you're wasting words. I never read that part on the air anyway. Second, you might be a great storyteller at parties when everyone is drunk, but this is the written word and that's not the same thing, plus you should be sober. And third, you may be deluded. Did you ever watch the first horrible contestants on a season of American Idol? They think they're great too. Just get on with it.
3. Proof read your story, or better yet, have some one else do it. If they read your work, then look at you quizzically and say,"Huh?", you will need to clean up your prose. Your brain knows what it wants to write, so it fills in blanks and misses mistakes when reading it's own writing. The value of proof reading, for these contests, cannot be overstated.
4. Have patience. Your brain works faster than your fingers can type. Work on your story. If you just try to get every memory in your head funneled through a keyboard and into an e-mail message and then you hit "Send", chances are you have sent me a garbled pile of phrases that only make sense to you.
5. OK, knock off the "Priceless" format letters. Too many writers use it now. "One horse blanket, fifty dollars; a trip to the dentist, five hundred dollars; getting kicked in the head, Priceless!" Just don't do it. If every letter ended the same way, you would barf.
6. Use the right words. "Here" and "hear", "accept" and "except" and "addition" and "edition" are three pairs of words that are not interchangeable. "Than" and "then" are two words that get mixed up and they shouldn't. You should know better than to use them incorrectly. If you do, then I'll become madder than a wet hen and then I won't read your story. Then, you will be sad, but being sad is better than having piles.
7. You no have to chop sentences to get under word limit. If every letter I read sound like it written by Tarzan, you barf. Needless to say, that no good.
8. Correct punctuation, capitalization, spelling and sentence structure all make your story easier to read. If you are trying to win a contest, why would you not make your letter easy to read? If you don't care enough about your entry to spend some time on it, why should I?
9. You can't seriously expect us to read a bunch of profanities on the air, can you? Leave them out of your story. (The previous two sentences were relieved of five profanities.)
10. The closer you stick to these suggestions, the better your chances of having your letter read on the air. Following them won't make you a great writer, but they will keep you from doing things that irritate the judge, and that's me. It isn't reasonable to expect every letter to be perfect, and just about every e-mail gets edited, but it isn't fair to edit one letter far more than another. At some point your work becomes my work, and that's not right. If there weren't prizes involved it wouldn't matter, but there are, so it does.
and one more thing...
11. Keep written dialogue to an absolute minimum. A conversation that seems clear in the writer's memory often shows up on paper looking like: "... So He sez Holy SH*t aandd I go down tthe stairz and I go "Holy Sh*t' an'd he sayys Look ou!t but I don't here" %5 him becaz+ my ma was>?/ yeling what^> are you too doing up their.??/""..+=)8&^<%>4#@! Needless to say we all died. Priceless."
