Introducing: The 5 Second Novel

The Briefest of Tales from an Odd Little Universe

Graphic by the author

We’ve probably all heard of Hemingway’s six word story: legend has it that Ernest Hemingway won a bet by writing the six-word story, “For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.”

Short, and to the point.

The Form

For those not familiar with the form, this is known today as “flash fiction,” or “microfiction.” There are many terms applied to it: this form has historically been known as the “short short story,” which is defined basically as something under 1,000 words.

I began writing this form several years ago. As a lark, I cooked up a meme on Facebook I called “The 5 Second Novel” and wrote the first one, and then the second, and it suddenly had a life of its own — and I kept going in fits and starts until I hit #213. The idea was to capture a complete story in a graphic, which at the time Facebook seemed to like squares that were 468 pixels on a side.

Graphic by author

As I progressed with this form, I did go over the advertised “five seconds,” but I adhered to the physical limitation of the size, which pretty much choked me off at a…