I want to write words that are polished and pretty
poetic, prophetic and wonderf’ly witty
with verses and stanzas and pages galore,
and when I am finished write ten pages more.
Except there’s a rule that I need to address.
The word count is fifty. No more and no less.
Helen Ksypka lives in Eliot, Maine. She is the author of “A Chef for the Queen,” and her humor has been published by Meadowrook Press, Reader’s Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, Light Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere.
Seven words drop us into the action. Sprinkle exposition with the next six. Narrow in on a few details; figurative language reigns. Hyphenating and wordsmithing neologisms condenses ideas matter-of-factly.
“Dialogue can help,” she advised.
Leave space for inferring.
The last seven words resolve the story.
If any idea doesn’t fit,
Dave Myers (he/him) lives and teaches in Bend, Oregon.
I found a tiny niche today that might be a home, a perfect fit for me with gives where I bulge and lifts where I lean, a door that welcomes thoughts and holes in the roof the size of words that fill the house up when the total reaches fifty.
Stephen Tilden came across this website an hour ago and wrote this to commemorate the discovery. He has been looking for this for a very long time!
Didn’t enter the ring for the competition, but rather more for a discourse with the future. The brain more of a sponge soaking up the spill to feed its thirst than a tool used cleaning up the mess left behind.
A challenge barely begun and certain to last only moments.
D. Andrew Bradley is a currently unemployed truck driver wasting time on the internet. He has no writing experience or education beyond what would be considered normal. He just found this quick mental release of blah-blah rather satisfying. Not sure of what will happen next, but back to work means less writing.
It’s been a lot of fun writing stories with exactly fifty words, but new frontiers of microfiction are calling. Upon seeing the success of a site like www.sixwordstories.net, I’ve realized that the important part of the term “microfiction” is the prefix “micro”. What people really want are short stories, the shorter the better!
So from today forward, this site will begin posting stories even shorter than fifty words.
The first of these stories will go up shortly. It will consisty of exactly ten words. Where will things go from there? I’m not sure yet, but I know we’re going to test the very limits of this genre known as “microfiction”.
If you’re a fan of microfiction, then you’ll know that part of the challenge is telling a story in such a small space. If you really want to challenge yourself, you reduce the number of words available to you.
Enter www.SixWordStories.net. This website, run by Pete Berg, is dedicated to probably the shortest format of fiction I’ve ever encountered–stories told in exactly six words. You thought fifty words was hard? Try reducing your word quota by 88%! (Yes, I did the math on that. On a calculator.)
Pete and the site staff write some stories themselves, take reader submissions, and also share six-word stories they’ve found out in the Great Wide Internet, written by famous authors like Cory Doctorow, Orson Scott Card, and Ursula K. Le Guin. This includes the most famous, and probably first, six-word story, by Ernest Hemingway:
“For sale: baby shoes. Never used.”
There are some great stories on the site, so for some more microfictiony goodness, head over to www.SixWordStories.com now!