Monday, November 20, 2006

The Very Very Short Story

The November 6 issue of Wired magazine features a series of six-word short stories. Taking a cue from Ernest Hemingway (For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.) they invited a number of well-known authors to take a shot. A few of my favorites:

Longed for him. Got him. Shit. (Margaret Atwood)

Wasted day. Wasted life. Dessert, please. (Steven Meretzky)

The baby's blood type? Human, mostly. (Orson Scott Card)

Kirby had never eaten human toes before.
(Kevin Smith)

Easy. Just touch the match to... (Ursula K. LeGuin)

Don't marry her. Buy a house. (Stephen R. Donaldson)

1 comment:

C. Watson said...

I used your link to access the rest of the 6-word stories and shared them with my composition class. After pairing them up, they each took one story and had 15 minutes to write a before-story and after-story and illustrate. Then we voted on the most creative and entertaining.

Your post also reminded me of what Barbara said when she was here, about how when you leave out words, they're still there, something like a shadow of meaning. This reminded me of one of my opening day activities where I have students write one-sentence stories and we work through observation, inference, assumption skills.

Thanks for the kick-start today.