Stories in one sentence

I just came across an article about writing stories in six words. Apparently it was once a challenge given to Hemingway (I think). I have seen stuff like this before and even a site dedicated to stories told in one sentence (or some other ridiculously short format), and I have to say I am not entirely fond of the idea. Certainly it is interesting to try and reduce your work done to something so short, but I feel many people fail at the task. I find myself reading these six word stories and just being disapointed. Certainly it would be a difficult task to write a story in six words. But the point is also to not have to explain the story with more than six words. As always with creative writing show don't tell, and if you get away with your story by telling for six words than you have cheated me. The story cannot be complex. It can't even have more than a single scene. It can't be a metaphor, since really you don't have the time to compare. So overall this task is near impossible to do without leaving the reader feeling cheated, although some would argue that is all right since you've only stolen six words of the reader's time.
I think though, that I am going to stick with the longer stories. I don't need to compress my work down quite that far, nor do I have the skill to do such task. Yet.

Robot Sports

So instead of paying attention in class today I was thinking about Robot Sports. It is rather complicated to explain how I got on this thought track so I'll leave it at that. And I have written a poem in tribute of this.

Robot Sports

I am thinking:
Robot Sports.
Think about it.
Robots, and
Sports.
Big mechanicals,
performing with a precision
that I can't even conceive.

Of course it would be in a league of its own,
we wouldn't want robots playing in
human leagues.
Leagues where mistakes can be made,
where the amazing play is not
made through calculations made at
3.16 Terabytes per second
but with the chance that can only be obtained through luck.

No we will keep our mistakes.

Copyright 2008 William Curb

10 Day Week

I recently read about a guy that took a week off of electronics as much as he could (he worked with a computer so he still had to check email occationally and such but he did the best he could). I've been thinking that this might be a good experiment for myself to conduct. I am a fairly computer savy guy and I spend a lot of time look at screens. One of the things I've been trying to do is figure out what I'd do with my time if I were to take away my computer time. That there was the sign I needed to do this. I shouldn't define my life by how I spent it online. So come this summer I am going to take 10 days off of all screen time, and that includes email and such. My biggest hassle will be my phone, which also gets internet so I am just going to have to pretend it doesn't if I need to make a call. Hopefully I won't need to use it too much. The reason I have chosen summer to accomplish this task and not now is of course my finals. I am going to need to be on my computer and I am going to need to be on it often (I have quite a few papers to write). As well I am going to have summer school so I am going to wait till after that is finished to take my break from screen time. I'll update again about this when I am closer to the date, but I think this is going to be a fun project. It will be interesting to see what I learn from the experience and I'll try and keep notes.