Help with short story

[LAM]

I need to hav some kind of basic 600-800 word story which will make up a quarter part of my Trial School certificate exams in year 10 in a couple of days (yes, I have to study for a quarter of a School certificate for a subject I dislike yet manage to be good at simply because of necessity to keep my parents of my back.)

It has to be a story of any of the following genres:
Sci-fi
War
Fantasy
Romance
Crime Fiction
Satire

So I hoped that the INTPs gifted in english here could help me out with a short story or ideas or plots, etc. Seriously. I don't want to be forced to study because then I might become so bored so as to stop existing (well technically my body still will, but my mind will be gone; replaced by automatic reactions.)

 

[SpaceYeti]

It's short, so there won't be any character development, or even much depth of character at all. I'd go Sci-Fi or fantasy, and don't explain anything, just describe what happens. If you explain anything 1) the story itself won't have room to get told and 2) It's just dumb. You're dealing with fictional technologies that either won't work in real life or are so inefficient or just plain dumb that explaining them removes suspension of disbelief, since you're basically telling people "Yeah... this wouldn't really work". Or, in the case of fantasy, you're dealing with magic. Magic defies explaination by definition.

Now... we need an event, which must be surmounted in a climax, and a resolution. There's not enough room for a decent introduction, so just hit straight into the action. What's the plot? Choose anything. A star that's about to explode, A space station that's about to explode, a plasma conduit that's about to explode, a magical artifact that's about to explode, a volcano that's about to explode, a war that's about to explode, pretty much anything you can imagine. Just start typing and roll with it.

 

[Cognisant]

Sci-fi
It's in the name Science Fiction, a sci-fi story is all about the science, perhaps pseudoscience if your doing high-Sci-fi (post singularity, other-dimensional sort of stuff) but more often than not it's "15min into the future". Anyway the point of sci-fi, the crux of a successful sci-fi story, is exploring the implications of new technology on the world, society, and most importantly the individual. People like human stories, it's all well and good to describe epic space battles, alien worlds and face raping bugs, but without the human element most people just don't care, they want to know what your characters think/feel about the situations they're in, about each other (human is a loose term here), and about themselves when the big discissions need to be made.

Hot Tips:

1. Show don't tell.
Don't say X is a moron/genius, show it so the reader can work it out for themself, actively look for situations where your characters can demonstrate their qualities to the reader, they're you're characters after all and you've (theoretically) put a lot of thought into them, so flaunt them, let the badass do badass stuff, let the coward scream like a little girl and pee himself, etc.

2. People are icebergs.
Don't summarize your characters, NEVER think of them as "just characters", because if you do so will your audience, what makes a moving character is depth, most of which isn't going to be explained to your audience, or even shown for that matter, because the little things, the inexplicable things, are what make people interesting (go read some books on psychology, every writer needs to do this). A well written character never gets old because the deeper the writer goes the greater depth there is to find, in theory you could write about one character forever and the story would never get boring.

3. Be a total prick.
Do you like to mess with people's emotions? C'mon you know you do, don't be a moralistic pussy, you want to make people laugh, smile and be happy, but you also want to make them fume, cry and blush with shame. Toy with people's heartstrings like a spastic with the devil's fingers, then in the end give them the "happy ending", because like it or not you're a prostitute now, a hoe for the minds of your readers, so make them happy, make them want to come back and read more.

 

[Anthile]

So you want a story?

There is a young guy, no name given. He lives in a non specified, rustic and all around rather primitive village. His life was rather uneventful so far and he was trained to be the next village priest. But when he holds his first mass and drinks the sacramental wine for the first time, reality blurs out and he has a vision of a guy in a space suit standing right before him and the guy tells him that this is not the real world, it's all a lie and he should come with him. The young guy panicks and after a while, the vision fades. People stare at him, nobody but him saw anything. As he looks at them, their faces don't look quite ...Euclidean anymore and their movements seem a bit off. He thinks it's just the shock. At the next mass, the exact same thing happens. Guy in a space suit appears, tells him to come with him and the young guy freaks out again. Now the other villagers seem even more abnormal, he can't understand them anymore, all they say sounds like gibberish to him and just looking at them drives him almost insane. He goes back home, can't sleep and has a mental breakdown. He can't take it anymore. In the middle of the night, he sneaks into the temple and drinks the wine. The guy in the space suit appears again and this time he comes with him. But as it turns out

Spoiler

THE ASTRONAUT WAS HIM ALL LONG AND NOW HE IS DRIFTING THROUGH SPACE. In the distance he can see his spaceship. But he's almost out of oxygen and there is no hope for him. Oh, if he only accepted to come back earlier!

Bonus points if you reveal that his actual name was Tom.