Legend says that friends of the writer Ernest Hemingway challenged him to a bet. He had to write an entire short story in ten words or less.

(The five important elements of a short story are characters, setting, plot, conflict, and theme.)

The result of this little wager was the following:

"For sale: Baby shoes. Never used."

Isn't that just brilliant? So simple but provocative, and Hemingway actually accomplished this in six words, whereas I probably would have used the ten.

For "Short Short Stories" Protagonizers can attempt to recreate this phenomenon. Unfortunately, there is a minimum requirement of 140 characters to create a post, but you can put up more than one short story in the same entry, or you can just ramble on and on.

This really isn't so different from "Haiku" or "Haiku 2". Be inspiring, emotional, wise, dramatic, or funny, etc. Just keep it brief.

(Credit goes to my Writing 12 teacher for getting me all worked up about Hemingway's masterpiece.)

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Author guidance for This story

In-class I had the six word limit; Protagonizers get ten, true to the original bet. Did you know? Although repeatedly attributed to Ernest Hemingway, no one has actually been able to prove the author of the Baby Shoes story.

updated Jan 10 '09 by Traxisk