Maybe because there are signs of spring here where I live in Montana and the world feel like it has new possibilities, but something has me wanting a burst of fresh ideas and new challenges. So I want to lay out a challenge for you. This is an old exercise, but a good one, for it forces the writer’s hand to think about the basic building blocks of stories and the true nature of tension. I’m prompted to suggest this exercise today in large part because I will be joining a workshop later today where the story up for discussion has one of the best first sentences I’ve read in while, a sentence so good that it contains the core of the story and its protagonist. I’ll ask the writer for permission to share it when we talk later today, and if granted, will post it next week.
So as you surmised from the post title, the exercise is to push yourself to write a one-sentence story. Not just a good sentence. Not just a first sentence. But a story contained in a sentence. If you take up the challenge, I encourage you to post it in the comments. I would love to see what you create.
The most famous example, and one worth studying simply for its suggestiveness, is a one-sentence story attributed to Hemingway (and whether that is true or not is the fodder for a different kind of story):
For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn
Have fun with this exercise.
I hope spring is springing where you live.
And just because I happened across this, a bit of fun with one-sentence descriptions of another sort follows. I seem to be stumbling into writer conversations nearly constantly about the drain of social media balanced against what can seem a writer’s requirement to market his/her work (a requirement seconded by some agents and dismissed by others). It can feel a necessary evil. And I personally—although I admittedly use social media for marketing—find evil aplenty in social media, particularly in the way it preys upon still developing adolescent brains. But that is, as they say, a topic for another time. Let’s laugh at it instead:
And Chris La Tray published an entire book of one-sentences *swoon*