For sale: baby shoes, never worn

This thing amused me a lot - especially after having just completed Atlas Shrugged - which is about 1200 pages long!

Have you heard of 'Flash fiction'? (or 'sudden fiction' or 'microfiction', 'micro-story' or 'postcard fiction' or 'short short story')

I hadn't - till I came across this Ernest Hemingway's six-word flash,

"For sale: baby shoes, never worn"

Yes, that's the whole story! Apparantly Ernest Hemingway was once prodded to compose a complete story in six words; Hemingway accepted the challenge and came up with this story...and it is said that he rated it the best among his work.

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...

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I explored a bit on this and found that such form of writing is called 'flash fiction' i.e. fiction of extreme brevity.

Wired magazine had published a compilation of few of them

The one I liked is:

Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket.

- William Shatner

And

We went solar; sun went nova.

- Ken MacLeod

After this I collected a few interesting attempts by various bloggers/ writers:

Shit or get off the pot.

You're not my wife? My bad.

the pattern was perfect. well, no.

hmmmm....there must me something more...

I hate long goodbyes. Just leave.

Another interesting thing I found was:

The World's Shortest Horror Story:

"The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door."

(author unknown to me)

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Cool, isn't it? It really amazes me - The power of words - when used sparingly :)

~ Kaustubh