Chris McDade

Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in 6 words. As the legend goes, he considered the following to be his best work:

“For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.”

There is something I find fascinating about this concept. There is so much unwritten and so little context that it enables each reader to decide how they interpret the story. It could be anything from a sad tale or a very happy tale. It could be that the baby died before being able to wear the shoes or the family had so many gifts that the baby grew up with more clothes than it could wear.

It is a minimalist approach to storytelling but also ties in nicely with the concept of my last post of thinking outside the box. If one of the great authors of our time can consider such a short story his best work over novels with hundreds of thousands of words then why should we limit ourselves to conventional structure in anything.