Six Word Stories

Hello readers! I don’t know if I’m mentioned this before (I have), but I work in the coolest bookshop ever. As this week is Independent Booksellers Week, I thought it might be a good time to remind you all.

This was a customer testing our pens.

A couple of weeks ago, my colleague and I were discussing the concept of the six word story. For example, Ernest Hemingway is (incorrectly) believed to have once said that his best work was a story he wrote in just six words:

‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’

And yeah, it’s pretty spooky. But we thought we could do better, so we took to Twitter to rally some would-be writers. Here are my six favourite responses.

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6.

So they’re all still horror stories in their own way…

Six word stories are amazing because they are the ultimate in flash fiction. Their brevity means that they can’t have any filler. It’s the perfect exercise in modernity!

Can you do better than the examples above? Let me know in the comments.

Tags: 6 word stories, apocalypse, appleseed bookshop, baby shoes, books, chamber of secrets, chamber of secrets has been opened, competition, ernest hemingway, extremely short story, fiction, flash fiction, Harry Potter, hemingway, horror, j.k. rowling, mudbloods, scary, short story, six word stories, terror, unnerving, zombie, zombies