Words ...
Originally uploaded by Ieneke.

I was recently reading a book about writing, and the art of writing, when I came upon an apocryphal tale of the power of brevity. I’m not sure where and when and even if it happened, but it’s rumored to, and it doesn’t matter if it did because the story is just as powerful as a story.

The story tells us that Ernest Hemingway, an American literary deity who was maligned by Classics scholars for his undecorative, straight-to-the-point writing style, was dared by a friend and contemporary to “write a compelling short story in six words.” The only rules were that the story must have a beginning, middle, and end, and must be compelling enough to get published. Hemingway accepted, and spent an evening or two with pen to paper, scrawling out miniature narratives. He returned with a story so compelling, and with such depth, that it was published the very next week in The New Yorker. The story read:

For Sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.

As I read this little gem of writer’s folklore, I was struck by how powerful, rich, and deep this six-word story was. It brought so much to mind...let my imagination fill in the plot gaps and the faces and the names... but what was more remarkable was how much it explicitly told me. In six expertly selected words, I could access 29 years of human experience to instantly and powerfully fill in these gaps with more than just conjecture... I could lean on my gut to fill in the gaps...and without wild subjective conjecture or speculation. Someone had a baby on the way (pregnant, likely), and planned ahead. She anticipated that child, she looked forward to it, and even planned far enough into the child’s life to invest into shoes the baby wouldn’t need for several months into his/her life. Then, something happened. Likely something dreadful. The baby was gone, the dream with it, and the shoes rendered a purposeless reminder of what should have been. The would-be parent even went so far as to sell the shoes; to post an ad to both remunerate her now useless purchase, and to excise this tragic memento from her home.

This is a tragic story with a beginning, middle, and end, and is every bit as emotionally compelling and haunting as some of the best short fiction I’ve read. And it reminds me that, when crafted carefully and artfully, even a few words can tell a very big story. Whether in a letter to a loved one, a Carlos-Williams poem, a song lyric, a quotation scrawled on a blackboard, an epithet yelled at an enemy, a commercial concept, a political mantra, etc. etc., it only takes a few choice words to make a huge impact. And when I sit down to write long summaries of research, or tell a neverending tale to a friend, or to pen lengthy blog entries (such as this one), I do well to remember that, and to flex the power of selection a bit.

As an aside, if you haven’t explored this genre of “flash fiction” (stories written in a few words or a single sentence), I encourage you to check out onlineflashfiction.com and onesentence.org. There are some very funny, sad, and encouraging pieces on there [one read something like, “‘I’ll never do that again,’ he thought, as he slipped cautiously into the warm tub.”]. And I hope you’ll try to write your own...you can’t possibly claim you don’t have the time. Here are four one-sentence short stories I wrote on a flight back from Orlando:

“No one will hear you scream through the gauze,” he told me as the nitrous took over.

As I groped for my wallet in the dark, the morning sun made it clear she was not, in fact, a flight attendant.

The only sound left was disposable booties toeing the linoleum floor, and the long, thin electronic whine.

“’How much,’ will never matter again,” he told himself, as his last quarter scraped his final ticket.


Cheers,
Justin