Editor's Note

A guy, a gal, a ten-gallon hat, a vintage convertible and a whole lot of open road. Think you can write a short love story about that?

Last year, we laid out the same challenge: Write a 1,500-word piece of fiction that fits a photograph. More than 1,000 people took us up on it, but only one was Dean Hebert. Hebert's day job is advising students in the honors program at the University of Maryland. The 40-year-old also teaches a short-fiction class there, but he's never published one of his own stories. Until today. Now he can say his work saw print with the likes of Stuart Dybek, Julie Orringer, Julia Alvarez and Walter Kirn, acknowledged masters of contemporary fiction.

The photo that inspired Hebert to win our first love story contest is reproduced here [the second photo in the slideshow above]. Study it, and then study his winning entry, which begins on Page 26. It might give you some insight on how to craft your own entry. First, note that he didn't start with the obvious: the phone call. A surprisingly large number of submissions began like this: "Ring. Ring. Ring." By contrast, here's Hebert's opening sentence: "In my version, I'm Superman."

But wait, you're thinking, how in heck did he get to Superman from a woman talking on the phone in bed? I'll let Hebert explain. Something about the way the woman was turned away, hunched over the phone, spoke unhappiness to him.

"I decided she was heartbroken, but how did she get that way? I traced it backwards. I'm not a woman, so I didn't want to write from her perspective. I wondered who was on the other end of that phone. In an early version, it was the narrator. I decided it would be somebody a little weird. The phone she's holding has that old-fashioned curly cord. Maybe that's why I got on the Superman thing -- it was of that era. And the idea of a character who thought he was Superman had been kicking around in my head for a while. I always have a story fragment kicking around. So, I started working with the Superman metaphor, and it began paying dividends -- her name can be Lois! As a writer, you can create details that fit perfectly.

"I didn't think that Lois was her real name, but, to him, she was Lois. Which gave me another piece: He's the kind of person who writes his reality the way he wants it. And I knew that this relationship was far from what he wanted: He couldn't be involved with Lois, even though he loved her. Since unrequited love is the most painful kind, I wanted to put him in that position. So, she's married -- to his best friend. And then it gets complicated."

Ah, complications -- the secret to all good stories.

Tom Shroder can be reached at shrodert@washpost.com.