Ernest Hemingway, as a young journalist in the 1920s, bet his colleagues $10 that he could write an entire story in just six words.
He made the money on this: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”
As an example of brevity this is second to none, but is it really a story? Does it meet all the rules of drama that I tend to insist on?
It is true that there is no plot, structure, protagonist or antagonist, but this is a story because it evokes an emotional response in the reader, and that is the main objective in creative writing.
What Hemingway does, and in a masterful way, is to leave out everything except those words that are going to trigger emotions and let the reader complete the story. It’s a trick, but brilliant. His story doesn’t answer questions, he asks them, and the main one yells ‘What happened to the baby?’
What happened to this baby for whom shoes were bought but are now not required? Why does a baby no longer need shoes? All the answers seem tragic, death, illness, kidnapping, all of them a parent’s nightmare. The parents then, or those who placed the ad, are the protagonists. The antagonist is unknown, the question of what took the baby. By the time we get to the story, it’s over and we’re left to use our own imaginations to fill in the pieces. We must create, in our own heads, the beginning, the middle and probably the tragic end.
But is this the only conclusion that can be drawn? I tried to think of alternatives and it is true that they are weak. A drug-addicted father buys the shoes, but then sells them when the craving for him becomes too much. Possible, but the gap between advertising the shoes and getting the money to buy the drugs would seem too big. Another option is if the shoes were bought as some sort of practical joke and, having served that purpose, are no longer needed. This could be plausible but it stretches the credibility, because the intensity of those six words is lost. Hemingway didn’t make them ‘baby’ shoes for no reason.
Every word here is carefully chosen, and especially the last two. ‘Barely’ used doesn’t, and neither does ‘unused’, though it would have narrowed the story down to five words. That word ‘never’ is the key, because it is like a lament for what ‘never’ will be.
Like the capable director of a horror movie, Hemingway doesn’t show us his monster, he leaves it to our imaginations, and here’s a lesson for all of us. Less is, in fact, more. Finding the balance between how much exposure to give the reader and how much to hide puts the writer in as precarious a position as any tightrope walker.
I have always advocated brutal rewriting and editing of your own work. All superfluous words must be discarded as soon as possible. Hemingway takes my creed to the limit.