In this article in Electric Literature, “7 Flash Fiction Stories that are Worth a Tiny Amount of Your Time,” we find Ernest Hemingway‘s spare, one paragraph “story” excerpted from his novel In Our Time.
Below is the story in full, the whole paragraph of it. What makes this story complete? Is it plot, suspense, character, setting? Think about the elements of fiction. Notice the careful precision of the details. How does Hemingway do it?
Chapter V, In Our Time
They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.
