Thursday, April 19, 2007

One Sentence Stories

Here's a site dedicated to one sentence stories. You wouldn't think this would work, but it so does. Check out some examples:

billray - I knew I was out of my league when she used 'summer' as a verb.

Sam - My dismay led to tears when my Underoos didn't transform me into He-man like the commercial said.

Joe Touchole - As I bent over to pick up her pen, the sound of my pants ripping warned me that my life was about to change.

I have this theory about my writing and how it's been influenced by my life of programming. When it comes to programming, there can be absolutely no ambiguities. As a result, when I write, I have this urge to fully spell things out completely - which sometimes is a good thing. Yet, it often leads to verbose writing. Instead, I need to learn to trust that you, the reader, will fill in gaps I leave, rather than throwing a compiler error.

See, take that last paragraph. Shira would have simply deleted it, as it's not necessary for this post.

So, excuse me, I'm going to go study the art of one sentence stories and hope to heck it makes for shorter blog posts.

How ironic is it that you spend most of your school career learning to fluff and pad your writing to exactly N pages, when you should be learning the difficult task of writing using fewer words.

1 comment:

  1. Oof, I hear you, man! My blog posts are always way longer than I intend them to be. This ends up keeping me from blogging as often as I'd like to, because I don't have time to write a whole page about a subject every time I think about one (several times a day).

    Heck, even my comments on other blogs usually end up taking multiple paragraphs (case in point, right here). I could have just replied to this with "Amen, brother!" or something like that. But noooo... Our programmer brains just don't work that way.

    ReplyDelete