Ernest Hemingway considered one of his flash pieces his best work. Check it: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." With so few words, Hemingway relayed a poignancy and sadness that reaches out to the reader.Last year, the techie magazine Wired challenged some well-known writers to see if they could do what Hemingway did, create effective flash pieces using six words or less.
Below are some of the more interesting contributions:
Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.
Joss Whedon
Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
Margaret Atwood
It’s behind you! Hurry before it...
Rockne S. O’Bannon
TIME MACHINE REACHES FUTURE!!! … nobody there …
Harry Harrison
We went solar; sun went nova.
Ken MacLeod
Epitaph: He shouldn't have fed it.
Brian Herbert
K.I.A. Baghdad, Aged 18 - Closed Casket
Richard K. Morgan
These are some of the examples that stood out - at least to me. The one that has the poignancy of Hemingway's piece is the Richard Morgan's picture of a young soldier in a closed casket. In six words, he brings home the futility and pain of war. Harrison's time machine portends the future of mankind if we continue the way we are going. O'Bannon's piece is humorous even as it relays something frightening that is gaining on a hapless victim. And could we expect less from Buffymeister, Joss Whedon. Atwood summarizes the course of many a relationship.
Flash fiction is fun to do, but is also a good way to train for longer pieces. Brevity should be the aim in most works of fiction. Meandering sentences and wordiness tends to drag down a story. Very few authors are adept enough to utilize wordy expositions that don't hinder the fiction. So, choose your words carefully.
For those of you who really want to write short fiction (or novels, for that matter), why not do some flash exercises or the six-word challenge from Wired. See what you come up with. You might surprise yourself how much story you can pack into so few words.
