Six words, that is. I ran across an old Wired Magazine article with six-word “stories” by science fiction, horror, and fantasy writers. A few of my favorites:
“Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time”
Alan Moore
“We kissed. She melted. Mop please!”
James Patrick Kelly
“The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly.”
Orson Scott Card
According to the article, the idea came from the six-word story Ernest Hemingway once wrote and called his best work:
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
I think this would make for some interesting assignments in English class. Some possibilities:
- Main idea work. Take a story and condense it.
- Segway from short stories to poetry. Every word is ultimately crucial.
- Writing prompt practice. They could write these micro-stories, trade them, and write a longer story based on the six words, filling in the blanks.
Update: 4/28/08
Last week, I used this as a journal topic. I gave students a number of examples, including the ones listed here, and asked them to try to come up with their own. Quite a few coming soon! For now, here are some I came up with to use as examples.
This one reminds me of a much-needed vacation gone terribly wrong:
“Weekend beach trip rained out. Alas!”
The next two summarize two of the stories that we were reading at the time.
My tenth-graders had just read “The Cabuliwallah” by Rabindranath Tagore:
“Fruit seller missed daughter, found substitute.”
And my eleventh-graders had just read the Onondaga-Northeast Woodlands creation myth, “The Earth on Turtle’s Back”:
“Woman fell. Turtle sacrificed. Earth began.”
Update: 4/29/08
Here are some of eleventh-grader Drew’s six-word sentences. He wrote thirty of them as a page of his journaling last week. The first one is probably my favorite.
“New job. No deodorant. Old job.”
“Edgar Allan Poe. Groundbreaking American Writer.”
“Bad hair. No shower. Bad day.”
“Heart beating. Sudden smack. New life.”
“Sleeping soundly. Dog barks. Wake up.”
This one, Drew said, is about 9/11/2001:
“Plane crash. Few survivors. Long war.”
His description of the next: “Keep on walking. Let no one know how you feel, even though it is easy to see.”
“Heart on my sleeve, I walk.”
If you have any six-word sentences you’d like to add, let me know
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