This week will see the announcement of the winner of online magazine ‘Fleeting’s six-word short story prize (conducted by Matt Shoard). The competition involves coming up with the most interesting, intriguing and compelling short story, in just six words! Shoard aim’s to find a winning story that will rival the inestimable brilliance of Hemingway’s famous offering ‘For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.’
In this twitter-age pithiness and lucidity of dialogue is fast replacing the elaborate, wrought discourse of twentieth-century novelists such as Joyce and Lawrence. Shoard’s competition reflects and responds to a growing celebration of the richness of pared back, elided, succinct speech - an awareness which spreads even to fiction.
Although bound by a strict six-word restriction (a limitation which strikes fear into myself as an English student) the submissions are not lacking in richness, variety and interest. Some notable examples include; Dan Brown’s ‘his Russian bride hid others inside’ and my particular favourite, Fran Edney’s ‘Groundhog day. Groundhog day. Groundhog day.’
What is so interesting about the ‘stories’ submitted to Shoard’s competition is their capacity to be read initially as statements. There emerges an infinitesimally thin line between fact and fiction, statement and story, explanation and narrative. I think that it is this liminality which makes the submitted ‘stories’ so interesting and complex.
Shoard’s competition is encouraging writers to re-describe fiction, to reclaim language in its simplest most direct form, and to create narratives that look to the reader to expand and enrich them.
As for the short-listed writers, I’ll tell you my own story about them; ‘They came, they wrote, they prospered.’
Jessica McKay
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