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February 18, 2008
On Brevity
- Absence of lengthy verbiage of political-social-economic nature
- Total objectivity
- Truth descriptions of persons and objects
- Extreme brevity
- Audacity and originality; flee stereotypes
- Compassion
Perhaps Chekhov hadn't read Edgar Allan Poe's famous 1842 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales, in which he advised, "Extreme brevity will degenerate into epigrammatism." I have a feeling that Ernest Hemingway did catch this warning, though, for when he was challenged to write a story in six words, he took old Poe to task with this:
"For sale: baby shoes, never used."I love Hemingway's story - how it attests to the power of implication! For a long time, I thought it very sad, until author Antoine Wilson schooled me otherwise. Now I appreciate it even more.
As pointed out on this blog a few days ago, Smith, the online magazine devoted to storytelling and personal narratives, is publishing a compendium of 6-word memoirs by various authors (some of them were previously compiled in the 2007 edition of The Best American Non-Required Reading.) My favorites include Drew Peck's "Ex-wife and contractor now have house" (which follows in Hemingway's footsteps of implication), and Bob Redman's "Being a monk stunk. Better gay" (for its musical qualities). All entries are fun, and they make you want to try writing one.
I myself am terrible at the six-word story, autobiographical or not. Perhaps that's the real reason why I don't want the "extreme" in my "brevity." I use as few words as a story requires - but sometimes a story requires a lot of words. Isn't that what writers of the long short story - such as Alice Munro or Deborah Eisenberg - might tell you? But Poe warns against this, too, for "the sin of extreme length is even more unpardonable."
Uh oh.
- Edan Lepucki @ 10:44 PM ~
comments: 3 ~ Links to this post
Garth Risk Hallberg @ February 19, 2008 12:06 AMAs for the six word story, I love Antoine Wilson's description of Hemingway's never-worn baby shoes: "the most pathetic footwear in the history of so-called flash fiction."
If I had to write a six-word story, I think I would plagiarize an Onion headline to do it. Consider this recent one: "Local Housewife Overcomes Rubbermaid Addiction. Or: "Web-Browser History Chronicles Couple's Unspoken Desires."
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