The last sentence is actually invisible.

It’s a kind of literary game.
Sentences must have exactly six words.
Apparently someone wrote a whole book!
The New Yorker reviewed it recently.
The reviewer played the same game.
All his sentences had six words.

What about five word sentences?
Could that also be expressive?
Or would it become restrictive?
Guess you’d have to try.
It never hurts to experiment.

Four might be hard.
There aren’t enough words.
Gets way too terse.
Sounds like bad Hemingway.

Three is ridiculous.
It becomes constricting.
Words fail me.

Feeling uncomfortable.
Getting nervous.

Quitting.

5 thoughts on “The last sentence is actually invisible.”

  1. One of the regular improv skits on Whose Line Is It, Anyway? (the U.S. version) was a scenario in which each actor was limited to a certain (and different) number of words per sentence, generally fewer than 4 or 5.

  2. To give credit where credit is due: Ben Bederson (two comments up) was the person who told me about this six word sentence thing. I’m afraid to get the book, because once I start looking at it, I probably wouldn’t do anything else for a week.

  3. This reminds me of “The World’s Shortest Stories: Murder, Love, Horror, Suspense, All This and Much More in the Most” and it’s sequel, “World’s Shortest Stories Of Love And Death”.

    Each contained a series of stories, each of which limited to 55 words or less, aka 55 fiction.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/55_Fiction

    It is an interesting exercise in restrain, and there were several absolute gems in each book (as well as quite a lot of crap, but we take the bad with the good, no?)

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