Ernest Hemingway was once prodded to compose a complete story in six words. His answer, personally felt to be his best prose ever, was “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” Some people say it was to settle a bar bet. Others say it was a personal challenge directed at other famous authors.
At the Flickr site we have a group that uses a photograph as the seed to composing a six word story. What i propose here is to look at the photo most recently posted and write your own six word story. Have those few words tell the whole tale, and let the picture be its visual interpretation. Just make sure the title of your pic does indeed contain SIX WORDS in English and is a complete sentence (or two). It is much easier to write only a headline or description, but make it a sentence - one that augments the photo.
Or if you get tired of the current photograph, add your own and start a new series of 6 word stories.
I’ll start with a photograph i took during WestFest last year.
My 6 word story:
Eddie was once struck by lightning.
The above are STATEMENTS, not stories… here’s a story:
Eddie finds head, regains family’s love.
You need a problem/obstacle to overcome and a goal to achieve. By striving to find his head, Eddie achieves his goal of getting his family to notice him again and long-lost happiness is recovered. In the sequel:
Eddie stands and family walks home ...
the story is in the journey which is a metaphor for life itself. And in the third of this awesome trilogy:
Eddie loses key, wife breaks window ...
we find the real heroine is Eddie’s wife who saves the family from spending the night outside by direct action. We come to admire her character and loyalty in putting up with a husband who first loses his head, then his car (that’s why they WALKED home in the second story) and finally cannot find the very key that would get them in out of the cold.
Hey, leave this stuff to us professionals, it’s dangerous to try it at home. ;-)
Heh, you’ve been watching too much television, Ralph. You know, the place where everything is spoon fed to us, narrated even, rather than allowing us to use our imaginations. Some stories are character development, some stories are people thinking, and - being zen - some stories are when nothing is happening. It’s a weird thing that isn’t always obvious.
And your stories read like more like newspaper headlines than stories.
Eddie finds head, regains family’s love.
Eddie stands and family walks home ...
Eddie loses key, wife breaks window ...
I don’t suppose you talk like Frankenstien’s monster at home… :D
of course you don’t really need a lot of words to do a good story ... the legendary Forrest J Ackerman (who’s still alive, in his nineties--I saw him at the World SF Convention a couple of years ago) once wrote the shortest I’ve ever seen (and it was widely published). I forget the exact title, something about ‘final grade for Planet Earth’ ... I can quote the entire story, however, from memory ... “F.”
