Six words and you can imagine all the heartbreak and pain of a longer story. There's a power in letting a reader fill in the blanks, but that's a different scrap. While I'm not a Hemingway fan in general, something can be learned from this exercise. I think this would be a good starting point for threads or NPC building. Often, I need a little jumpstart. My brain can't push itself into overdrive and fashion a complex structure or narrative. (Sometimes it can't even muster a "ppbbbbbtttt" sound.) In moments like that it helps to pluck an image or bit of dialogue that has a stand-alone quality. From there the story can gather. Forget about the huge tangle, find a searing bit that sticks with you.
Try it with me! Pull a single image or line together. It doesn't have to be padded in anything else. Just begin with that, and then ask yourself how you got there. Many people have brilliant ideas arise from just a single gleam. Maybe try this with a PC in a scrap. Write a story about them in under twenty words. Perhaps it can be the beginning line of a great thread. I would love to see what other writers will and can do with only twenty little words.
Here are some powerful examples from fiction & poetry where a line implies a whole story. They're not quite the minute story of Hemingway, but they have that arresting quality all the same:
“She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift.”
― Cormac McCarthy,
The Road“He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink...”
― Virginia Woolf,
Mrs. Dalloway“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby"I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."
-- T.S. Eliot "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
"This Is Just To Say"
by William Carlos Williams
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
***