Tell a story in only six words
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” A famous quote, attributed to Albert Einstein, that contains a lot of truth. It’s no secret that, whatever message you want to convey, the fewer words you have to use, the better.
But how far can you go? In how many words can you tell a whole story?
According to Hemingway, that is perfectly possible in no more than six words. Most people will undoubtedly frown at this crazy idea. And although we are now accustomed to expressing messages in few words (think Twitter), this assignment seems a bit absurd.
The inception of the ‘six-word-story’ legend has been debated profusely for years, but frankly, it doesn’t matter. According to lore, it finds indeed its origins with the famous writer Ernest Hemingway. The story goes that at a dinner, Hemingway engaged in a wager with his companions — all of them writers — that he could write a complete story in only six words. The challenge was accepted, and Hemingway wrote the legendary sentence ‘For sale, Baby shoes, Never worn.’ on a napkin. He passed the napkin around and collected the money. Or so the tale goes.
True or not, the concept presented in the story is interesting in its own right and poses the question of how far one can go with literary constraints. Nowadays, one can find a great number of Internet communities that have set up websites based on this challenge, with a lot of literary gems as a result. It is an exercise that I often do with my trainees and students. You can easily develop other variations on it, like ‘design your epitaph in six words’ or ‘write a sentence of six words about what creativity is to you’.
Other variants of the concept are the mini-saga (50 words), twitterature (140 words) and flash fiction (1,000 words). The last variety contains a full narrative and development of characters. You find these mini stories in short literary supplements in magazines.
Ready to write a six-word story yourself? Here are a few tips:
- Get inspired by what others have done before you. As stated before, there are many communities online where you can sometimes find great examples. For example, you can start at www.sixwordstories.net.
- Your story doesn’t need to have a beginning, a middle, and an end like a classical story. However, it does need a plot to make the reader use their imagination.
- Use at least one verb because verbs lead to action. Something ‘happens’. Because if nothing happens, it is just a statement, and not really a story.
- Go for the twist or the contradiction. You only have six words, so you have to be surprising. Say what the reader doesn’t expect or employ some mystery.
- Use punctuation. Periods, commas, colons, question marks, quotation marks, etc. This way you can split up your story into two or more sentences and say more. It also gives rhythm to your story.
This article is an excerpt from my book “When the Box is the Limit — Drive your creativity with constraints”
