Ernest Hemingway once made a wager that he could write a complete story in only six words. "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" may have won him $10 back in the 1920's, but in 2006 it sparked a minor internet phenomenon. WIRED magazine asked well-known science fiction authors and screenwriters to take a shot at writing their own six word stories and I decided to illustrate them.

Submit your own story!

Questions? Get in touch.

Very Short Stories was started mid-January for the 2007 MIAD Senior Thesis exhibition. The images you see here are the result of that endeavor: to illustrate a selection of these stories for print.

I also really liked the idea of challenging myself in this way. I had gotten this great little storyboard notebook for Christmas and I decided to pick some of my favorite stories from the feature and fill my little sketchbook with ideas for images. It was my intent to illustrate as many of the stories as I possibly could in time for the senior exhibition. For some stories the pictures came really easily, others were a challenge and required pages and pages of sketches to arrive at a place I was happy with. I found a printer for the book that was inexpensive and allowed me to print a small number of the finished books for the show (which, I might add, turned out really well).

Download a free copy of the book in PDF form from Lulu.com.

Read the original blog post about the project.

But the project doesn't stop there, friend. Twelve illustrated stories is great, but one hundred is better. Click the link to the left to submit your own story for the next iteration of the project.