Back in late October 2006, I wrote a brief post: Six-word biography challenge, a pastime in which one is allowed three lines of six words each to write a short autobiography (or biography). There were lots of good suggestions in the comments, which dried up, as is the wont of comment threads, in December (2006). Suddenly, on 8 February this year (2008 in case you hadn't noticed), two more comments were appended to that post. How strange.
Dave Lull then added another: "Nicholas Lezard says that "Six words can't tell good stories. It's just not enough to plumb any kind of depth. Discuss. At length" (Guardian article). Curious, I scanned the Guardian article whose link Dave supplied, and got it: Mr Lezard's piece, rehashing the story of the six-word game, had presumably caused the old Petrona post to show up in Guardian readers' search returns. Or something along those lines.
Mr Lezard's article contains a quote from the New York Times: "Of last year's 10 bestselling novels [in Japan], five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels." Mr Lezard's point is that six-word novels aren't literature, they are advertisements ("Never knowingly undersold", for example, the slogan of my favourite shop, John Lewis). But I don't think anyone ever thought otherwise, did they? Or, to put it in six words: "Bestseller equals literature? Ain't necessarily so."
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