by Dorothy Rosby

I admire people who write novels. When I try writing fiction myself, I get so attached to my main character that I can’t bear to have anything bad happen to her. And if nothing bad happens to your main character, you don’t have much of a story. “Our smart, strong and beautiful heroine woke up refreshed and had another really great day. As usual, she made only wise decisions, and no one bothered her all day.” My protagonist would be gloriously happy and very nearly perfect, but no one would want to read about her.
You probably don’t want to hear that the main character in my column—me—only makes wise decisions and is nearly perfect either, which is lucky because that would be a lie. I’m able to endure writing about the cold, hard facts of day-to-day life because I only have to do it for around 600 words. That’s another reason it would be hard for me to write a novel. Novels tend to be somewhat longer than that.
I’ve been writing a column for an embarrassingly long time—embarrassing because after this long I should be better at it. But one thing I’m really good at is hitting 600 words. After so much practice, everything I write is that long—my grocery list, my will, my thesis. Actually, I’ve never written a thesis. But if I ever do, I’m sure it will be 600 words long, which means I probably won’t pass my doctoral program.
You can see why there probably isn’t a best-selling novel in my future—or a doctorate. But there is a literary craze I’m interested in trying because it’s shorter than 600 words—one-line poems, six-word memoirs, five-word stories. I’m not making that up. Don’t get too excited though. My columns will never be that short. In column writing, I’d call six words a headline. You might call it mercifully short.
Maybe it all started with Twitter. On Twitter you’re limited to 280 characters to say all you want to say. And when you see what some people tweet about, you’re glad that’s all they get.
Of course, before Twitter there was the extremely short, but very important bit of writing, the epitaph. There’s even a day set aside for it. Plan Your Epitaph Day will be observed on April 6, because a boring epitaph is a fate worse than death.
And mini stories aren’t exactly new. There’s that old poignant example of a six-word story: For sale: baby shoes, never worn. It’s often attributed to Ernest Hemingway, but many believe it was actually written by that other equally prolific writer, Anonymous. Whatever the case it was created long before Twitter.
This has all been a long way to say I want to try writing short. It just seems easier than writing a novel. Unfortunately, like so many other things, it’s easy to do, but hard to do well. When I came across a contest offering a cash prize for a 20-word poem, I was inspired to write this: As is typical, my heroine had a wonderful day. Come on now! What else would you expect me to say?
I didn’t submit my poem to the contest.
I came up with this for a flash fiction six-word story contest: Our heroine made only wise decisions.
I didn’t submit that either. But I do think that even if the judges didn’t like my six-word story or my 20-word poem, they’d probably still finish reading it.
The hardest one for me was the six-word memoir. I wanted to write, “I made only wise decisions” but that would be a lie and you shouldn’t lie in a memoir. The best I could do was this little ditty: I’ll be sticking to 600 words.