LESS IS MORE

I stumbled upon the ‘FOUR LINE LONG POEM’ recently and it got me thinking, are we heading towards a succinct world? Is less, more? Or are we just getting lazier? Is brevity the new brainy? No flowery prose or verbose dialogue needed now, just tell it to me straight.

“HATE BEEF LOVE TOFU”, “KNOW TRUE LOVE ONCE”, “BALD DOGS LOOK PINK”

OK, so you could interpret these ‘poems’ as deep, ridiculous or just plain bizarre, but this montage of four liners is also telling of our concentration span. Tweets and Facebook updates have to be engaging enough to stop us in our tracks at least long enough to LOL back some kudos.

Perhaps this is merely the latest fashion of story telling, but currently we are actively encouraged to make clever use of limited characters. Hemingway toyed with telling a complete and very short, short story in six words, that’s 32 characters to you Twits out there. “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”, he claimed it was his best work.

The best use of Twitter I’ve seen to date aside from Towerbridge’s personable, informative and human Tweets, “I am opening for the FGS Brandenburgh, which is passing downstream.” is the creatively succinct tales of TimKeyPoet. Key manages to paint a world in a few brush strokes and leave us asking questions and frankly wanting more; “Poem#171. “I’m not marrying that pig!” I said to mother. She continued to leaf through the portfolio.”

Short, short stories are not a new phenomenon and I’m not claiming as much, but haikus must be sagely nodding at Twitter and waiting for all the fuss to die down. In the mean time it concerns me that we might lose the ability to converse in more than 140 characters.

Dear Mr Branson, I am writing to complain...

I was sent this link about a now infamous letter of complaint addressed to Richard Branson.
It's a brilliantly penned letter, I wanted to share it. Read it here.

What's in a name?

I started a creative writing course last week at City Univeristy and thought I'd share the fruit of my labours. One warm up piece involved interviewing each other about your name and then writing about your own, we had 5 minutes and only one draft. It's only an exercise but it's a uselful one to loosen up, meet new people and get writing.

The questions were:

What is your name? Why were you so named? What does it mean? Do you like it? Do you have any nicknames?

Me and my Name

Michelle, Meeeeechelle, Muhshell, Shell, it doesn't abbreviate well or even sound that pleasant in your mouth. But in French! Oh! Michelle! It's all flounce and passion, my belle, it's Beatles song lyrics and most definitely not a hairdresser with a bubble perm.

You may have guessed I don't like my name, je n'aime pas, so I'm off to St. Pancras to hop on a train where my name doesn't offend the ear and I may offer the true meaning of my name in a flourish, God's right hand.