“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” The world’s shortest short story, apocryphally written by Ernest Hemingway, right?
Yeah, well here’s one almost as short, and I wrote it myself: “Little girls’ bikes, set out for dibs.”
#chicagostory
On communication, professional and otherwise.
Not to diminish the theme of desperation you have captured so effectively and the emotional impact of your story — I could barely hold back my tears and fortunately had a hanky handy in the pocket of my corduroy jacket — but this draft is a teeny bit wordy and borders on the precipice of presumption, easily correctible by deleting “girls’ in your next draft.
Don’t you think “Little bikes, set out for dibs,” while spare and granted, more purely journalistic—lacks a little of the pathos the first story has? Like, the difference between the panhandler’s sign: “I am hungry,” and the one the ad man helped him with: “I am hungry, and it is spring.”
Thoughts, Dr. P?