The other day, Monday I think it was, I asked Arielle Garcia what she was looking at on her computer. She replied, "the shortest story in the world." As a Literature teacher by heart and training, this piqued my interest, so I asked her to email it to me:
"When he awoke, the dinosaur was still there."
Great galloping brontosaurus bones! That's an amazing story!!! Turns out it was written by a Guatemalan writer named Augusto Monterroso, and at only eight words long, it very well be the shortest story in the world.
Tell me something that you liked about this story. Why is it a story? What does it mean? If you didn't like it, write a story yourself that is ten words or less in length!
What a coincidence I read that book in a Spanish version. I had no idea it was written by a Guatemalan writer... Very interesting...
ReplyDeleteI liked the simplicity of this story. I thing that what makes a story is not only the structure climax, problem, etc. but also the originality of that story and the meaning of the story.
ReplyDeleteI happen to know that story, and it amazed me too, the first time I saw it. Although it is very short, if you carefully think about it, it does include the elements it needs to be a story.
ReplyDeleteI think it's interesting how in every story, there are missing pieces in between the lines. The author does not tell us what happened in between those lines. It's our job to find out what happened. We need to fill those empty spaces. With a sentence like these, we can fill thousands of thousands of lines. We can keep mending a whole story with that single line.
ReplyDeleteThis is the kind of story they should make us read in literature not the 2000 or 3000 word 'short' stories they make us read. The thing that makes this story is you get to make it your own by filling in all the blanks.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it is the longest story in the world that never finish in your miagination. I have just started it.
ReplyDeleteThis story was pretty short but I still think that if all the stories were this short it would be pretty weird and maybe even boring to read them. This is what you can truly call a short story and it beats the short stories we have read in Literature class.
ReplyDeleteI think it will be considered as a story because there is a narrator who makes the story flow. I think it means that the narrator thought the dinosaur was gone, but it turns out that it wasn't. I wouldn't say that this was my "favorite" story, but I liked it because it was only eight words. I hate reading long stories! In fact, I don't like when there are about 10 pages in my literature text book, and it is labeled as "short" stories.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Ji Ye about that it might be a never ending story, because with those eight words you can imagine a lot about it like how he got to see the dinosaur and what happens after he sees the dinosaur. It was a nice story, I wished that Literature stories were like these, that way we don't read to many pages.
ReplyDeleteIt is so succinct and clear. What i like about the really short story is that the author does not describe or write needless information, it's really weird.
ReplyDeleteI really don't understand how this could spread as much as it has, the story has no point at all and it's really boring.
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ReplyDeleteI thing that that story has a beginning, climax, conclusion really short but interesting.
ReplyDeleteSeriously? That's all? Where did Arielle even find this?
ReplyDeleteI wonder ho he might have written it? I always thought (until I heard about this) that stories were supposed to be long and that they will maka no sense if they were this short.
ReplyDeleteGio, you get to make every story your own by filling in the blanks.
ReplyDeleteAs I told Mr. AB before, wouldn't posting this story in your blog be considered plagiarizing? Cause I could type in the whole Harry Potter series in a blog and have people read them instead of purchasing the book. I don't think just because a story is ridiculously short people have the right to overuse it.
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