Friday, April 18, 2008

Today's Exercise In Stealing Content

And it's a double steal! Woot! By way of Lyn Viehl's blog, Paperback Writer, I found One Sentence-True stories, told in one sentence. What is One Sentence? I'll let them tell you:

About One Sentence

One Sentence is about telling your story, briefly. Insignificant stories, everyday stories, or turning-point-in-your-life stories, boiled down to their bare essentials.

The idea was born from a blog entry several years ago that got a million (actually, only 14) responses. "Maybe this will take off more as its own site," thought I. Let's see.

So, please post your "one sentence" story in the comments. I'd also ask you to post it on their site as well, since ya'know...they deserve the hits for having the idea in the first place.

I'll begin with one of my own.

Tapping the man on the shoulder, I said, "Putting a package of doughnuts on the counter and then walking around and choosing six more items from the shelves is called shopping...not 'next in line'".

Update:
So, I followed my own instructions and dutifully went back to OneSentence to post mine. You don't have to sign up for anything...easy-peasey! However, once you post it you discover that not only are you being moderated, you get sent to a page that basically tells you your sentence will show up shortly after hell freezes over. I actually think that's kind of funny and I still encourage you to add to their backlog.

14 comments:

Eric said...

Seconds before the steam explosion roasted them both to a muddy, well-done red, Hawking asked Ned when he'd last cleaned the glass on the pressure gauge.


______________

Sure, it's not "insignificant," but rules are for wusses. Also, mine does have things "boiled down to their bare essentials," so it complies with that....

Nathan said...

And this happened to you?

Hmmm?

Eric said...

"Fuck it," Eric thought as he typed, "I don't want to write about something that really happened, I want to make some shit up," and that's exactly what he did, made something up and posted it as a one-sentence story.


___________

Happy, now?

Nathan said...

I'm happy that you gave it a shot. I'm less happy that at least one of your commas really oughta be a period...making your followup more than one sentence.

I"m a harsh taskmaster. XD

Random Michelle K said...

Actually, he could have used a semi-colon and it would then be grammatically correct.

Eric said...

Eric shook his head as he read the comments--he knew perfectly well he technically should have used a semicolon (but thanked Michelle for the support anyway), but the other readers on Nathan's blog probably didn't realize Eric had been reading a Rick Moody collection (Demonology, to be specific), and that Moody tended to have these delicious run-on sentences that Eric had decided to emulate, one story in fact being a single run-on sentence several pages long; Eric realized perhaps the joke had been lost, that many people not only didn't bother reading McSweeney's or careening through the vast length of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest but understandably detested such works, detecting (perhaps rightly) a degree of pretentiousness in those authors (who Eric frequently took to be playful, but Eric was often full of shit); in any event, Eric thought about responding with an even more epic run-on sentence, defying the rules of grammar and standards of readability like a high-wire artiste and maybe throw in a few links to a book he'd enjoyed and another he was in the process of enjoying, and he even thought he might put in a sort of meta-posting twist at the end of the sentence, finishing the single block of prose with a crude attempt at meta-humor, and that's when he decided not to hit the "publish" button at all, much less fill in the captcha block.

Nathan said...

OK,

Ya got me! LOL

Anonymous said...

Eric, you are the master. ::bowing::

My 15 y.o. son writes like that too - sentences that are 8-10 lines long, all commas and no periods.

Anonymous said...

She anxiously bit her nails as her husband drove his brand new car across the icy mountain pass, but finally, the phone rang.

PS - has anyone else noticed the increasing length of Blogger's captcha codes? They used to be 5-6 letters, now they're often 8 and even occasionally 9. :(

Nathan said...

Glad the phone rang Jeri.

And I've been getting strings of j's and i's and l's and stuff that looks the exact same in their slanty writing.

Anonymous said...

Justin laughed.

Random Michelle K said...

Jeri, I thought it was just me!

I just keep hitting "Publish" until I get something short and reasonable.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the link, Nathan! I liked you're interpretation of "where's my sentence?," too. :)


... Ryan
onesentence.org

Nathan said...

YVW Ryan.

Look around and make yourself comfortable.