Liz Warren | Storyteller

Ernest
Hemmingway was once challenged in a bar bet to write a story in six
words.  He worked on the story for some while and finally came up with:

“For sale:

Baby
shoes,

Never
worn”

A couple years later he decided to
call this six word short-story one of the best stories he had written. 
The reader/hearer of this story, if curious, must fill in the details with
their own imagination. 

Sometimes we
tell way too much of the story and do not leave the hearer to fill in the
blanks in their life.  Personal stories connect us especially when we
leave out many of the details.

I believe the
six word format can help us chunk our personal stories.  This short form
of our story performs the task of a mnemonic device to inform us and leaving
art to take over the function of the story.  Smith  magazine has a project on this
device called Six-Word Memoirs which, “seeks to provide a platform for
storytelling in all of its forms.  Can you tell your life story is just
six words?  This eventually became the book, Not Quite What I Was Planning:   Six-Word Memoirs from Writers
Famous & Obscure, which
quickly became a New York Times bestseller.  Two examples are:

“Failed SAT.

Lost scholarship.

Invented rocket.”
- William Shatner

“This
is

a
short

blog
duh!”

-Brad Auten

I once
heard that literary critic Edgar Allan Poe call the Prodigal Son (a parable
from Luke 15) the greatest short story ever written.  This same feature is
at work in parable allowing the hearer to fill in the details from his/her
perspective.  In this way it opens meaning – and connects the teller and
the listener.