Short stuff

My friend Kate Baker tweeted earlier today:

Trying to debunk a myth in my college text book that says "Genre fiction does not work well in short-short stories.

That seems like a bit of rubbish to me: short fiction (and, by extension, short-short, however you might define it) is ideal for genre stories for a lot of reasons. For one, the longer a genre story plays out, the more the conventions of the genre might be stretched to the breaking point (the reader might start to wonder how dwarves procreate or how the murderer knew the victim would order the fish or how long can cowboys ride between bathroom breaks). For another, a fair bit of genre fiction tends to be built around a "gag"--take, for instance, Isaac Asimov's first published short story, "Marooned Off Vesta," which uses paper-thin characters and fairly plain language to tell an interesting story about Newton's Third Law Of Motion: that's the whole story, Newton's Third Law, the end. It's not a bad story (I'm not holding it up for a list of all-time greats, mind you--it's not that good, either), but you certainly couldn't stretch it out to novel length and why would you want to? Gags tend to be easy to spot in SF--some curiosity of physics or neato recent astronomical discovery--but they're not confined to that genre. The gag in a mystery story might be something with time zones or the gag in a western might be some neat bit of frontier trivia, the gag in a horror story might be some sort of what-if nugget like, "What if you were your own ghost."

I had to wonder if Kate's textbook's writers were distinguishing between "literary" and "genre" fiction, but the problem with that is that plenty of "literary" writers have used short forms to dabble in genre fiction; Flannery O'Connor and D.H. Lawrence come readily to mind (for their horror classics "The Lottery" and "The Rocking-Horse Winner," respectively). Depending on whether you count novellas as short fiction or long fiction, the "literary" Henry James' "The Turn Of The Screw" is considered one of the all-time great ghost stories. (Personally, I find Henry James pretty tedious, but I don't think I'm any danger to his literary reputation.)

Anyway, I think I got sidetracked here. Over lunch, trying to answer Kate's pleas for help, I stumbled across an old Wired collection of very short stories--six words, in honor of a story Hemingway allegedly called his best work. ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn." Hm. Not bad, actually.) Which was a bit inspirational and I thought it would be a fun thing to start up as a little game or meme or whatever (in this case, I like the idea of calling it a game much better). Here are five I came up with earlier:

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Bill tested the autodestruct only once.

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"I think it's dead, try poking--"

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Unstable bookshelf. Many books. Poor librarian....

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So many zombies. So little ammo.

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His long hair memorializes bald Rapunzel.

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Meh--they kinda suck. But now it's time for your own! While I think a discussion of classic shorts and genre stories would be awesome, I'm going to ask everybody to leave it to a different thread and that any commentators on this post simply leave their six-word-shorts here. I know, I know. But c'mon, it'll be fun, kids! So, please, humor me. Let's have nothing but six-word-short-short stories in the comments thread!

Let's see some very, very, very, very, very short stories!