Six-word Stories. (Seven-word Titles? As If. Crap.)

They wrote six words; no stories.

Hemingway too, except with great success:

"For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

Six words: a small story condensed.

Evocative miniatures of tragedies.  (To scale.)

The hunter squeezes.  His son falls.

She jumped; he died there too.

Cat toy on floor.  She cries.

Drunk driver, wrong lane: Mother screams.

"Shoes?  His feet are in Iraq."

Spooning: "We should see other people."

Dinner?  Delicious.  Now I feel vile.

Feverish, he tosses; sweating, hours pass.

Sheets soaked, throat parched: he stares.

"I'm dead."  (Will write more soon.)

Comments

[Luther Blissett]

Someone's -- maybe Cortazar's?:

When Pedro awoke, the dinosaur was still in the room.

[Belle Lettre]

Great stuff. I'm very impressed.

My offer:

Distressed, she waits. He turns away.

He wakes up to unusual silence.

The baby stirs. Her mother weeps.

[Belle Lettre]

BTW, I am finally getting away from the law review punny title and 10 word title. Ex: You Can’t Hurry Love: Why Antidiscrimination Protections for Gay People Should Have Religious Exemptions, 72 Brooklyn L. Rev. 125 (2006), which is a great article, but yeah, that's the type of people I'll be working with.

If only law reviews could be 6 words. I am impressed by brevity. I tend to verbosity. But we can't all be Hemingways.

[ben wolfson]

Neal Stephenson finally wrote a good ending!

[Toadmonster]

I didn't read them all in the article and most sucked, but Alan Moore's was great.

[Adam Roberts]

Straight from the top of my head, six six-word stories. They're harder to do than you think, it seems to me.

Your eyes are lovely. With wasabi.

‘The sky’s falling!’ ‘Don’t be stu—’

One of these words is poisoned.

A headless man? How last-century!

The one law of robotics. Kill!

The French for six is cease.

[The Necromancer]

"Morrison's bathtub, on a Paris night"

"This is the end, my friend."

"Rock and roll will never die."

More of a trilogy there. Something you might see scrawled in Pere Lachaise. Lots of sf royalty in that article. Didn't catch one of my favorites -- here's a story stolen from him..."The sheep did not look up."

[J.S. Nelson]

Close, it was Augusto Monterroso. The full text is: "Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí." (When [s]he awoke, the dinosaur was still there.)
Interestingly, the way Spanish works, it doesn't require as many words as in English. Is it cheating to composing a story in a different language to minimize word count? In German, I'd estimate most stories are naturally 6-12 words long, though they fill several pages.

[The Constructivist]

Vanity project I mentioned? It's here.

[Jonathan Dresner]

Grading papers while drunk had repercussions.

[Jonathan Dresner]

Reading the entries, I'm struck by how much they resemble Bulwer-Lytton entries: intriguing, suggestive beginnings or parodies, rather than complete stories.

[chris webb]

snowman carrot? bad in a stew.