Shortly after my novel Daykeeper won the Indie Author Project’s inaugural Indie Author of the Year Award and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s Best Fiction E-Book Award, I stopped writing novels. It wasn’t because I felt I had reached some milestone in my writing career and needed to “drop the mic.” It was because I could no longer bring myself to write stories where I had to expand them beyond what I felt their natural lengths were.
Like many other writers, I had read the apocryphal story often attributed to Ernest Hemingway, where, on a dare, he supposedly crafted this six-word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” It’s difficult to not be intrigued by the fact that an entire story rests in the spaces between those words. While it is possible to draw more than one interpretation from this story, many people, including myself, read these words and are filled with a sense of sorrow. All of that from only six words! Likewise, Augusto Monterroso’s story “The Dinosaur,” which, depending upon which English translation you read, clocks in at under 10 words (“When she awoke, the dinosaur was still there.”). In this short piece, your mind can’t help but race with ideas she went to sleep and what she will do now that she is still confronted with the same obstacle.
