Creative Writing
Single Sentence Poem (or Short Prose) Challenge
Inspired by Emily Dickinson and other writers
After the enthusiastic response to the Ten Word Story Challenge created by Sheri Jacobs, I decided to invite everyone to try the following challenge that I often use myself when writing and that I’ve assigned in many of my classes, too. I hope you enjoy it.
Write a poem or short prose piece in one sentence
The idea of this challenge is that you stretch your ideas of a sentence, letting one sentence flow across several lines of poetry or throughout a paragraph of fiction or nonfiction prose so that your complete poem or short-short story is made up of only one sentence.
Guidelines and tips to consider
The only “rule” for this challenge is that your poem or story be made up of no more than one (grammatical) sentence. Your sentence can use any punctuation that you want such as commas, semicolons, dashes, parentheses, etc, but please (pretty much!) follow the rules of punctuation.
If you’re writing your piece as a poem, you can use one stanza or many stanzas, but just one sentence (so if you have multiple stanzas, your one sentence would stretch across them).
