Without The Audience Having To Assume At The Outset That You'll Be Clever - Tumblr Posts
4 months ago
For sale: Baby shoes, never worn. Wrong size.
The post I just reblogged made me think about "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" and how, now, in our time of dramatically reduced infant and child mortality and increased abundance, the more statistically likely interpretation of that six-word story is this:
"Extended family and friends have gifted us too much stuff for our kid. They didn't even get a chance to wear these shoes before they outgrew them." And if that's not an indication of amazing progress, I don't know what is.
Tags :
on writing
for real though
concise writing is only useful insofar as it still conveys something reasonably interesting to the audience
without the audience having to assume at the outset that you'll be clever
or sad or funny or deep or whatever other thing
based on work they've done to understand the writing
rather than work the writing has done to set up the appropriate framework of interpretation for itself
that original six word story
for example
is almost certainly a made up legend about hemingway rather than a real thing he wrote
which makes the whole legend the actual story
and sets up the 'six words' as sad by the framework of the rest of the legend
in which the 'six word story' is not the full story anymore
but simply the climax of a longer one