 The title of this post was written by Ernest Hemingway, and is one of the first examples of 'flash fiction', very, very short stories. The upcoming Wired Magazine challenged sci-fi, fantasy and horror writers to see if they could top Ernest's very earnest six-word effort, in their own genres. The results are mixed, and, in my opinion, mostly disappointing. My favourites:
It cost too much, staying human.
- Bruce Sterling
Osama’s time machine: President Gore concerned.
- Charles Stross
Overall, this was the wrong group to ask. After all, these are the writers who bring you trilogies
-- they take up the whole first volume just to introduce you to the
characters. Much better to ask poets, or cartoonists, the masters of
brevity. TS Eliot, for example, could have proffered the following,
converting brilliant epigrams to short stories merely by changing
tenses from present to past:
Humankind couldn't bear very much reality.
The only wisdom was wisdom of humility.
The whole world was our hospital.
In our end was our beginning.
Where was the unimaginable Zero summer?
Or the words of Charles Barsotti, cartoonist non-pareil, brief and witty even without the accompanying drawings:
I sure didn't hire the consultant.
"Introspection", he roared, "is for losers".
Here's a few I came up with on the spur of the moment (OK, in the shower, this is harder than it looks):
2027: Civilization crashed. Fire, then ice.
He loved. Lost. Grieved. Carried on.
Black ice. Ten seconds. Skid. Crash.
Hemingway's opus brevis probably can't be topped. It's the personal
that gets to us, stirs our imagination more than the funny, or the
fantastic. The point of every good story is to engage the reader to
make it her/his own, and to fill in the ambiguities and blanks with
her/his own rich details and imaginings. And six words leaves a lot
of blanks. Also, parsing the six words into several one, two, or
three-word thoughts lets you say more, I think, than even the cleverest
six-word sentence.
OK. Your turn. Give us yours.
Six words, no more, no less. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
