Stories happen everywhere, all the time. In homes, out on the road, inside an office cubicle, on a roof-top, in a room… and they are not always that go on and on page after page. Some do, of course. But most finish rather unexpectedly. Many leave you with your own interpretations and some just tell you all there is to tell. Some tickle your imagination and lead you on to fantasies of your own. Some just say what you see and then you smile. Philip Pullman wrote: ‘After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.’ Yes, we need stories to make our lives liveable and peppy. Stories have eyes and the power to navigate us through our miseries and through trying times. Stories are so much like music and they make our heart go ‘thud’ or ‘beep beep’ or pause for a moment not wanting to distract our attention. Stories have a life of their own.
Yes, stories have a life of their own and yet sometimes we feel as if we live our lives ‘in the gaps between the stories’ as Margaret Atwood wrote in The Handmaid’s Tale. We are neither the character in the story nor have anything to do with what happens to them… and yet we find ourselves there. We are there bathed in myriad emotions and unable to differentiate between a story and what is not one. I guess we are the real fiction because the stories are woven around us, are about us and are us.
Let me share a little secret now. I once thought to challenge myself and convert all that I read in the newspapers into extremely short stories. The six word stories. Stories that say more than what their size betrays… stories about politics and all the good, bad, and gruesome things that the pages of a newspaper are filled with.
So here are my six word stories that exist because the political news of the day had some sort of an impact on me and the way the story-churner within me functions.
Six word stories:
Don’t stop. Just write. On me.
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Push harder. Pull harder. Churn richness.
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Chew away all worries and live.
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Hop until you are the CM.
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Hope until you are finally sighted.
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Don’t ever drive to a rape.
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Victory mantra: Outshout to win debates.
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She gouged one eye after another…
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The fool fell in love again…
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He won. He won once again.
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She converted the conversation conveniently, consensually.
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Trumpet your trumps and trump trumpets.
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Marry me. Convert me. Leave me.
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Quick, help me save the world!
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We’re actors and inside a movie…
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He tasted me. He wasted me.
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Go out to see what’s inside.
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Believe me when I read these six word stories, I can see complete pictures and I don’t think more words are needed. The nicest thing about them is that they have the capacity to create different characters for different readers and thus each story turns out to be different. Six word stories tend to get connected to the stories within us… and not one of them will ever be a clone.
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Six word stories
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This blog post is inspired by the blogging marathon hosted on IndiBlogger for the launch of the #Fantastico Zica from Tata Motors. You can apply for a test drive of the hatchback Zica today.
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Arvind Passey
08 February 2016
