I’ve always been a fan of getting straight to the point. Being brief, being concise. Yet I’ve never been a big fan of Ernest Hemingway’s terse and minimalist style. Until the day I read about his 6-word story.

The exact details of how this story came to be are a bit sketchy. Most sources say it was a contest or challenge that Hemingway took up. A handful say he bet his round-table cronies (William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dororthy Parker et al) that he could write a novel in six words – no more, no less.

Whatever the circumstances surrounding the story’s generation, the result was astounding:

For sale: baby shoes. Never used.

A complete and compelling story in just six words. They are six words that stay forever etched in my memory.

I thought of them the other day as I went to create my next 140-character Twitter post. I wondered how long it would take someone to launch a Twitter writing contest to tell a complete story in 140 characters. I didn’t have long to wonder because the very next day I heard about this contest over at Copyblogger.

The six-word story contest, the 140-character contest and others like them are all about writing fiction. What if you brought the same paucity of words to non-fiction?

Could you write an “all you need to know” guide in say, 25 words or less? I throw down the gauntlet to non-fiction writers everywhere.

Tags: Ernest Hemingway, short story, Twitter, writing contest

This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 4:35 pm and is filed under Writing & Editing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.