I found this at Linked in HERE. I wanted to find the shortest stories written. Well, someone else has done that for me so I've lifted it - well wouldn't that be a synonym for plagiarized - but not really as I include the reference and this isn't an essay to hand in.
The author is Bruce Turkel.
"It was said that Ernest Hemingway once made a bet that he could write the world’s shortest story. It would be a tearjerker of a tale only six words long.
His six-word story was, “For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.”
Hemingway won the bet.
Researchers have long since proven that Hemingway’s baby shoe story has been around since at least 1906. It wasn’t even attributed to Hemingway until 1991, 30 years after the author’s death. In fact, these types of micro tales go back so far that even William Shakespeare employed them.
“These violent delights have violent ends.” “Eaten out of house and home.” And perhaps his most famous line, “To be or not to be.”
This type of micro story is called “flash fiction.” These six-word memoirs were so popular that they spawned a series of books, one of which became a New York Times bestseller.
Here are some more examples: “Never, ever refuse a breath mint.” “I still make coffee for two.” “Goodbye mission control. Thanks for trying…”
Six-word stories like these also work in music. Here are a few instances where you can’t even read them without singing along:
“It’s been a hard day’s night.” “Want a whole lot of love.” “Every little thing gonna be alright.” “You’ve got a friend in me.”
But regardless of who wrote it, the six-word tale has something to show us. Simply put, you don’t need many words to create a big reaction.
Henry David Thoreau spent two years living by Walden Pond in the early Nineteenth Century. Thoreau wrote about what he learned during his time there in his now classic Walden. And while I don’t remember a six-word story from that book, I do remember that Thoreau used very few words to sum up his premise when he wrote, “Simplify, simplify.”
Clearly, Thoreau understood that it didn’t take a big vocabulary to make a big point (although, to be fair, if Thoreau really believed in what he was saying, why wouldn’t he have just written “Simplify”?).
After all, as Shakespeare’s Polonius once quipped to Hamlet, “Brevity is the soul of wit!”
The article concludes with: To read more posts go to www.BruceTurkel.com - so I did. He's a slick consultant who "travels the world helping leaders and companies..." Then I started to wonder if he has staff to write stories for him.
And whether his great good looks are real or courtesy of plastic surgery. Supposedly Demi Moore had $250,000 (ome articles say 250,000 pounds) before the movie Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle in 2003 - she denied the rumours.
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