The pen is scarier than the sword

In a time when narratives are facing the point of saturation, economy of words might be a powerful tool in sharpening the impact of delivery.

If brevity is the soul of wit, then netizens grow wittier by the word count.

A few months back, social news website Reddit asked their users—“What’s the best horror story you can come up with in two sentences?” And while the question was posed months shy of Halloween, Reddit users rose to the challenge like wildfire. The finished stories revealed some terrifically hair-raising gems, such as:

“The longer I wore it the more it grew on me. She had such pretty skin,” by blaqkmagick.

“Nurse’s Note: Born 7 pounds 10 ounces, 18 inches long, 32 fully formed teeth. Silent, always smiling,” by ichokedcheryltunt.

“Working the night shift alone tonight. There is a face in the cellar staring at the security camera,” by hctet.

“She wondered why she was casting two shadows. After all, there was only a single lightbulb,” by pgan91.

“There was a picture in my phone of me sleeping. I live alone,” by guztaluz.

Among others.

With a two-sentence requirement, the inevitable trend is that the first sentence sets the tone of the story, while the second delivers the punch line. It’s a neat little writing exercise, which, in keeping with the sentiment of modern flash fiction, already serves as stories in themselves.

Of course, others may consider them mere vignettes, which differ from flash fiction in that the former are impressionistic, and therefore inherently incomplete scenes, while the latter contains the traditional elements of any story, namely; plot, character, setting, and resolution. Unlike in traditional stories, however, the extremely limited word length means that most of these elements are simply hinted at, implied from the deft stringing of words in each sentence. 

Probably one of the most contested creations of brevity, straddling the line between flash fiction and vignette, is Ernest Hemingway’s legendary six-word ‘story’—“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Whether or not Hemingway really authored the work is sketchy at best. The point remains, though, that the sentence has a beginning, middle, and end. Enough to evoke the stirrings of a plot, even as it leaves a decidedly apocalyptic impression in the minds of its readers. A snapshot of a whole, or a complete story in itself? You be the judge.

* * *

In the realm of horror writing, flash fiction takes the genre to new heights.

There’s no question that the goal of a horror story is to elicit fear in its readers, and since the dawn of the Gothic novel in the 18^th century, writers have continuously worked towards refining the meaning of what makes the hairs on our arms stand on end. Horror stories, with its unspoken emphasis on the psychological, boldly venture into the abyss opened up by human imagination. All that lies on the dark side of the mind, lurking beyond the shifting frontiers of consciousness, is fair game in the hands of a serious writer of horror.

That said, considering how the horror story has been a process by which people try to come to terms with grand themes like death, suffering, violence, and destruction, length is usually the last thing on anyone’s mind. And yet, as the creative users on Reddit have shown, stripping the word count down to its barest minimum, in a word, works.

Think about it. In your typical horror story, atmosphere, foreshadowing, and pacing conspire and bounce off one another to create the kind of tension and build-up oft-deemed essential to any horror piece. You create an atmosphere that either cultivates fear or lulls characters into safety, drop hints throughout the plot that something very bad is about to happen very soon, tease the readers by strewing some false alarms along the way, and propel the story forward by intensifying all those tight feelings of fear.

Reddit’s two-sentence horror stories, then, comes off as almost irreverent in the face of all that effort. Atmosphere, foreshadowing, and pacing are condensed into the first sentence, leaving the second sentence to tie the strings together. Readers are placed in a more active position, forced as they are to read between the lines, allowing what’s left unsaid to scare the shit out of them. This kind of brevity would have been unheard of in the days of Mary Shelley and RL Stevenson, but in our time, the economy of words just sharpens the impact of delivery.

Considering how a concrete description of ghosts, spirits, or whatnot is glaringly absent from the meat of the two sentences, it’s a given that most of the fear comes solely from the active churnings of imagination.

Is this testament to modern society, then, that since our heads are filled with every manner of the creepy, crawly, and spooky, almost no prompting is needed for us to effectively scare ourselves? For most of us, the exercise in flash fiction is a healthy appreciation of the horror genre, showing how, in this day and age, everyone can be writers in his own write.

Inhabitants of the ivory tower might disagree, but then, with the waves of creativity (if not originality) coming over netizens, perhaps it’s as a wise man once said—it’s all about the wordplay.