Six Word Short Stories

Hemingway, in his infinite and very impressed with himself wisdom, bragged that he could write a short story in six words, which he successfully did:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

One of Hemingway's theories about literature was that writing should be like a giant iceberg. The words, like the tip of the iceberg pushing through the sleeve of the sea, should hint at the depth below the surface, but not fully explain it. Unlike the lookouts on the Titanic, we should read (see the tip of the iceberg) and penetrate the surface on our own, guess at the depth of the meaning below the surface. In the case presented above, this is a tiny sliver of ice peeking over the surface of water that hides a hulking beast of an iceberg, but, maybe because it's Hemingway, it seems to work.

Other favorites from the Wired site:

Margaret Atwood: Longed for him. Got him. Shit.

William Shatner: Failed SAT. Lost Scholarship. Invented rocket.

The trick, I gather, is to pique the mind and create a little world in six words. The point is not to write a marketing line, newspaper heading, or opening line to a play. See the wired article if you want examples of all the above. It's a great little brainteaser, so I tried a few of my own.


1. Broke eggs. Door slammed. All over.

2. Wife: Who! Husband: Your best friend.

3. Dead old woman; girl watches, regretful.

Bibliography Challenge 1: Sutherland's How to Read a Novel

How to Read a Novel by John Sutherland is more aptly named How to Choose a Novel, as this non-fiction exploration is more about selecting novels than reading them. This is a very quick read and well worth it if you are interested in fast facts about publishing and tips about selecting novels from the overwhelming thousands that get published every week.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is Sutherland’s success in putting today’s reading experience in the context of past and future reading experiences. For a nice counterpoint to today’s readers, Sutherland presents Samuel Johnson, the great critic who was able to say, albeit with a justified but very puffed up chest, that he had ‘read all the books that have been written.’ In the 1700s, that was absolutely possible. There were perhaps 2,000 books in the published canon. Today, that number of books comes out every month. The amount of books available is staggering and very daunting. I often become overwhelmed with feelings of inadequacy when I realize the number of books there are to read. I have done myself a favor and have (mostly) cut out ‘trash’ to make room for books that are actually interesting and not merely eye candy, but even with this boundary, there are myriads of titles that I pass up every time I select books; and there is no end in sight. There will be thousands more books on the shelves by next year and thousands more the year after that.

The form of books are unlikely to change, too, as Sutherland, gratifyingly, explains. (I worry about books going digital. I’m afraid I would have to take up a new hobby. My eyes can barely stand this.) Companies have tried to sell readers on reading from a computer, but they have been unable to do so. Readers like taking a book from a shelf, flipping the pages, writing some marginalia, and sticking it in a bag or pocket. Computers just aren’t this versatile.

Sutherland’s history of the novel and information about publishing is the most successful aspect of his book. The rest, the explanation of Bret Easton Ellis’ autofiction, maybe, Lunar Park, for example, is a low point; this might be, though, because I don’t know why ANYONE would read Bret Easton Ellis. I had a very traumatizing run-in with American Psycho in college and learned a valuable lesson. The bitterness over On Beauty losing the 2005 Man Booker to The Sea is heavy-handed and distracting. Though, the insights into how certain prizes, Pulitzer, Man Booker, Orange and Whitbread Prizes, move books but other prizes don’t was very interesting. I, for one, am a total sucker for the Man Booker.

As Sutherland makes clear, and with which I agree, reading is a tremendously expanding, fulfilling, and thought provoking exercise. There are many great books out there, regardless of which types of books you prefer, and it is useful to think a little about how best to sort through the paper piles to find them. If you are really at a loss, Sutherland says, do the page 69 test: if you like what you read on page 69, then you will probably like the entire book. Sounds easy enough to me.

Malcolm's The Silent Woman

Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman seeks to understand how the mythological figure of “Sylvia Plath” was created in the years since her death. Part biography, part literary criticism, part rumination on the role of biography itself, The Silent Woman unpacks the different views of Plath and argues for moderation. Essentially, as the title suggests, Plath is a woman who will be forever silent. The persistent efforts by scholars and critics to know her are futile. She will never be known; she is dead. What we do know about her has been changed, edited, revised, or erased depending on the person responsible. Her journals, published by Hughes years after her death, were edited to display a depressed mind. One incident Malcolm explains was particularly relevant to me, as I remembered reading this scene in the journals. Plath goes to Paris to follow a boy, not Hughes. She relates the details, and I am put off by the desperation in her words. The boy rejects her, as boys often do to desperate girls, and she goes to a coffee shop to order a cappuccino and write in her journal. She indulges herself for a moment, despairs of yet another boy gone, and comments on her loneliness, and the journal entry stops. Malcolm posits that the entry, in reality, did not end with this pity party, but rather continued to happier more optimistic topics. The upbeat part was edited out to give readers a more consistent view of Plath’s character. This type of posthumous editing happens time and again to Plath. Plath did commit suicide, so it is difficult to argue that she was emotionally stable, but to say that she was depressed all the time and hated every moment of her life, or to argue, as the movie Sylvia does, that she was posed to kill herself from the beginning is definitely a truncated view of her character.

Malcolm argues that Plath’s life has become a canvas for whomever is writing the current Plath biography. Those who want to see her as a depressive suicide-obsessive whiner will edit stories that prove otherwise, and they will use her poetry to under gird these ideas. Rarely do accounts deal with Plath as she probably was, a woman who was depressed at various points in her life, in a straining marriage, and capable of a full range of emotions at any one time. We will never know what happened to her the morning she stuck the towels under the doors, turned on the oven, and sat down in front of it. What we will know, however, is that this low moment may not be the reigning emotion of her life. Her poetry is expansive enough to allow for different emotions and scenes, just as her life presumably was. Malcolm’s efforts to expand our view of Plath’s life also helps to expand our view of her poetry.

When I taught Plath to my students, I would experiment. I would tell one class that she killed herself as part of the opening lecture to the unit. To another class, I would leave that information out. The class that knew about the suicide would “find” references to depression and loathing throughout the selected texts; they would not see her work as separate from this final, violent act. The other class was predictably more expansive in their findings. They would sense a low note of sadness, because it is there, but they would also find other things. They would see the beauty of her images and language; they would see the carefully wrought scenes. The class that didn’t know about her suicide would always, in my opinion, actually read Plath.

Because she can no longer speak to us, we are left as readers with a tremendous burden. Her poetry is confessional, so we believe that she must be confessing her suicide act through her words. We want to know why she did it, and we attempt to answer our questions in her poetry. As Malcolm suggests, and with this I agree, we lose her poetical brilliance and beauty when we choose to read her poetry as merely coming from a woman who killed herself.