Larry Hnetka Goes HMmmm

I’ve always loved language especially the “well turned phrase” á la Margaret Atwood.

Her novel, Cat’s Eye, made me go “darn, why couldn’t I write just one sentence like that” every second page I read.

I also like writers who give me a smack on the side of the head like Timothy Findlay did in his novel “Headhunter.”

If you haven’t read this novel, it’s worth it just for the opening scene where Lilah Kemp, accidentally sets Kurtz free from page 92 of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and is forced to find a Marlow to defeat him. I get shivers every time I read the first page of that novel.

Enough of the preamble. I stumbled across two writing sites that gave me a shot of writing inspiration.

The first site is called One Sentence.

One sentence submissions are invited but must tell an interesting or poignant story in the least amount of words. “Most of the best stories that we tell from our lives have one really, really good part that make the rest of the boring story worth it.”

How true, how true.

I scanned through some of the submissions and plan to go back and read more.

This one hit me smack square in the forehead.
Kris: “I married my husband on our first date, but it has taken me more than 5 years to decide what colour to paint our dining room.”

Check out more one sentence gems here.

By some type of serendipity, I then came across the home of two sentences.

Same objective as the previous site. The difference here is the two sentences must have some type of “tension” between them. How tension is defined seems quite broad.

Here are a few two sentence submissions I found intriguing.

• I asked, “is it possible for man to fly without any extraneous mechanisms?” The pavement did not answer.
• She felt the hand move up her back. Surely it was a hand.
• The summer apples fell around me, rolling ripe and whole in the dry grass. I kept shaking the tree; she couldn’t cling to the branch forever.

So with the best of intentions, here are some one and two sentence drafts I banged off.

• “A colony of aliens lives deep within Mount Shasta,” she announced as she adjusted her home-made tinfoil alien mind probe deflector hat.
• It was three in the morning when Bert looked at his scuffed shoes beside the bed and wondered aloud, ‘what have I done to deserve this?”
• “Just once dance me round and round the promanade deck of this Gulf Island ferry,” he pleaded.
• She shrieked in terror when he unzipped his trousers. The banana in his pocket sighed with relief knowing it would survive yet one more day.
• “Going my way, sailor?” “Don’t you know salmon swim upstream, mate and then die,” he replied, the soggy unlit cigarette butt clinging to his bottom lip.
• A light misting rain fell upon his uplifted face and into his open mouth. One kilometre south of Vancouver, muddy orange clouds hung over Ground Zero for the sixth day.

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