Take one of the most compelling “short short stories” ever written. It emerged as the result of a wager made to Ernest Hemingway by his unruly group of writing friends. They bet him that he couldn’t write a story in six words. It is hardly surprising that Hemingway took and won the bet. The surprise is that he felt that this story was one of his finest pieces of writing. He was right. With a bare minimum of words, he evoked one of the most powerful visual images, and also some of the same deep-reading processes we might utilize when reading his longer works.
