Tuesday 1/9/24
Over the last two plus days, I wrote a story while doing various things--sitting at Starbucks, running stairs, laying in bed--but it needs further background exegesis. Not in order to be read. But I did something neat here.
I wrote 150 stand-alone, single-sentence, six-word stories. Each had to function as a narrative. In order to have a narrative, a lot of other things need to be happening. A statement alone as a statement and nothing else isn't a narrative. There has to be implication, consequence, stakes, action, movement, progression. Realization on the readers part and what I think of as secondary realization. It means this and oh, and oh, and oh, and oh, and so forth. You write with space and negative space.
There's a "not so fast" component to some of these stories. They need to be read slowly. Because first one might think, "Oh, this means that." But wait...because, come to think of it, it could mean this. In which case...oh dear. These stories very directly say something about the person reading each of them.
These are stand-alone stories, but I also put them all together in such a way that there's also a separate apart from each of the 150, that being a larger story containing them all, which reads as its own kind of narrative.
I can imagine the spirited discussions that people could have about these works.
Pretty wild, right? These are very good. It is very good. I'll take the whole thing and put it in Become Your Own Superhero: Intrepid Exceptions to Modern Fiction. Good luck writing something like this.
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