One of my greatest joys when writing is to create stories in as few words as possible, whether I’m generating a piece of micro fiction, a picture book or a social media post.
I’m talking 500, 250, 100 or 50 words – and sometimes less, especially if I’m challenging myself to create a story in a sentence (around 20-25 words).
It feels like catching an idea in the act of becoming – and then disturbing it.
Starting out, I think of a character, a relatively ordinary action, and then I toss in something that shouldn’t be there. A boy finds a bird in his schoolbag. A dog brings in something that doesn’t belong to him. A woman opens her front door to find a suitcase she didn’t pack.
A useful way to build your own story in a sentence is to consider this basic movement:
- What is normal? Who is here and what is happening?
- What disturbs it? Something changes, goes wrong, is discovered or gets more complicated.
- What changes because of that disturbance? A turn doesn’t have to resolve anything, yet it often affects the character.
“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”
– J. D. Salinger, A Girl I Knew
Then there’s my appreciation of a beautifully crafted sentence, not only in terms of its function in the larger narrative, but also in terms of its sensory, rhythmic aesthetics in and of itself. I pay attention to where these sentences make me pause, and how a word – or a word left out – can change the whole picture in my mind.
The deeper into the forest she wandered, the more spider silk whispered across her face, the less she remembered the woman she was supposed to be. – Kim Hasert
Writing these kinds of sentences has other applications for your writing too:
- Brainstorming a longer story – a one-sentence story can be the seed or story engine to expand into a short story, essay or novel. Once you have the sentence, you can ask: Why did this happen? What happens next? What happened before?
- Finding the heart of a story – if you can’t reduce an idea to one sentence, you may not have uncovered the framework of the story yet. This exercise can reveal the character, conflict and change at its centre.
- Getting unstuck: when you’re staring at a blank page, this exercise can develop possibilities quickly.
- Testing an idea: a one-sentence version can tell you whether an idea has enough substance to sustain a longer narrative.
Writing exercise:
Why not try it out? Pick a character, action and one thing that shouldn’t be there, bringing it together in one sentence. Don’t explain what happens next, but start with what is relatively normal, disturb it, and leave us somewhere different from where we started.