Short Attention Span Required
Issue #36
Capping off at six sentences, this lit blog keeps it short and sweet
By Jen Girdish
Published: September 1st, 2008 | 11:05am
Constraint can be an essential ingredient for creativity. Robert McEvily at sixsentences.blogspot.com has come up with a fairly simple one: Tell a story in six sentences. It’s flash fiction, extrafiltered. Submission rules are pretty straightforward: paragraphs only, no poetry, six sentences.
The result is a lovely dose of digestible Web literature for a slow work day. Some writers stretch the sentence until it hemorrhages; others take the six-sentence limit very literally. Some stories are rants about sisters-in-law, odes to Tricia Helfer and Phoenician ghosts, and some are Post Secret–esque confessionals.
Six Sentences comes on a recent literary Internet trend to see how short we can actually make the short story. Wired ran a six-word story (á la Hemmingway) feature last year, and Smith Magazine’s anthology Not Quite What We Were Intending: The Six-word Memoirs by Famous and Obscure Writers hit the New York Times Best Seller List in March.
Maybe it’s a sign of literature trying to keep up with the deterioration of our Web-coddled, 24-hour news cycle, LOLcats-addled attentionspans. Maybe, but Anne Lamott is a fan.
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