Rāmere Shorts

The first game of #RāmereShorts happened in 2010 and was the inspired creation of then Book Council communications manager Sarah Forster.

Ten years later, the Friday ritual is still going strong: at 9am we deliver a set of six fresh words, and participants craft them into a small poem or story. A winner is chosen at the end of the working day: who used the words in the most original and clever way? Who made us laugh or cry or shake our head? Sometimes it just comes down to: who used all six words and kept within the character limit of 140?

We hope you'll join us on Rāmere (Friday) to compose a little something and share it with our community. We love reading the entries and seeing how different thinkers use the same words.

This one was penned by Twitter user alexandra_balm:
The words were: year, grow, adore, full, collect, see.

It takes a full year
to see real growth
the light when branches
collect together
the dew of fruit in adoration
that only children
can see

Around 9am every Friday (Rāmere) morning, we begin by posting six randomly-chosen words on our Twitter feed.
To play along, use these words to compose a small story, poem or witticism. Post them on your twitter feed, along with the hashtag (both #ramereshorts and #rāmereshorts will work, as will #RamereShorts and #RāmereShorts).
You can enter as many times as you like. Read the other entries and ‘like’ your favourites! When we see a new entry, we retweet from our account, and at the end of the working day we post a winner.

Character count

Your entry can be any length, but only entries that use 140 characters or fewer will be considered for the winning place.
We use a handy tool made for us by Lotographia (David Thomsen) which counts your characters and makes sure you’ve used all the words. There will be a link to the tool in each new RāmereShorts post.

Using the words

Winning entries must use all six of the words provided. These words can be tweaked to change the tense or plural, though. For example ‘begin’ can be ‘began’ and ‘dog’ can be ‘dogs.’

Judging

Around 5pm on a Friday, we’ll choose a winning tweet. We will usually go for the most succinct, moving, or funny entry. Then we check that it falls within the character count, and uses all six words.

Group entries

We know of one office that plays #Rāmereshorts together as a team-building exercise each Friday. Everyone votes on the best entry, then that one is entered in to the competition. There are also primary school classes who join in, and secondary school students, too.
We would love to see more work groups, families or schools take part! Please spread the word and join us.