Don Murray, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalism professor at my alma mater, University of New Hampshire, recently died but left so many of us with a lasting message: “There’s no magic in writing. It’s a discipline and a process.”
The hardest part of that discipline for me — and many others in marketing — is saying less, stripping out the adjectives, not over-explaining. Using fewer useless words makes for better stories. The other upside to being brief, according to Creative Think’s Roger Van Oech, is that limitations can “be powerful creative stimuIants.”
In the spirit of brevity and creativity, Robert Hruzek of Middle Zone Musings has created a contest challenging people to tell a story in just six words. similar to Wired’s November 2006 feature, “Very Short Stories”
My six word story contributions:
- Sleeping Beauty. Cinderella. Same charming prince?
- She struggled and then just laughed.
- The answer came from weird questions.
- Keeping lids on passion screwed them.
- Addicted to love, seduced by cotton.
- Housework kept her life uncomfortably tidy.
- Would you look at that? Uneffingbelievable.
