The internet has ruined us. Or saved us. Depends on who you ask.
Attention spans are shorter than a cat video on TikTok, and nobody has the patience anymore for a paragraph. Which is why short-form and minimalist prose is having its moment.
Writers are paring language down to the skeleton. They’re giving us stories that don’t just cut the fat—they skip the carbs, the cheese, and maybe even the plate. A single page, a single paragraph, even a single line can hit harder than a 400-page novel if it’s done right.
We live in an age of scrolling. That doesn’t mean people don’t want stories—they do, desperately—it just means they don’t want to wade through a swamp of words to get there. Minimalist prose is like an express train: direct, unpretentious, and impossible to miss.
Take Hemingway’s famous six-word story.
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
That’s not just writing; that’s emotional whiplash. With six words, you feel loss, absence, and a mystery you’ll never quite solve. Compare that to your last unread email newsletter sitting at 1,500 words. Which one sticks?
Minimalist prose also respects the reader’s intelligence. It hands over the skeleton and trusts you to imagine the flesh. That gap—the unsaid—is where the story actually lives.
Since I started standup comedy, something became easier: stripping words to the bone. Before comedy, I was cranky and reluctant to put my writing on a word diet. Who wants to kill their darlings when they’re so…darling?
But in comedy, less isn’t just more—it’s survival. The laugh lives in precision. You need to scrape off the fluffy parts to make a clear point. Too many words and the punchline dies of suffocation.
That habit bled into my storytelling, too. The other day, I took two long stories—fifteen minutes each—and fused them into a single four-minute story. And it worked. Comedy has been my editor, teaching me that brevity isn’t stingy—it’s generous. It gives the audience space to lean in and connect the dots themselves.
Write a story in three sentences. Or even better, three words. See if it holds. Here’s one:
Immigrant. Lost. Home?
Stories don’t always need furniture. Sometimes the empty room says more.
What? Too many words already? Okay, okay—I’ll shut up now.