1minutehistory

History of the 1minutestory

The 1minuteconcept was conceived as a way to entertain my brother and myself during a long train trip to Prague.

I had recently read One Minute Stories by the Hungarian author István Örknéy (1912-1979). These absurd, satirical, immensely enjoyable stories were written, as the author describes, so that they can be read "while the soft-boiled egg is boiling or the number you are dialing answers."

I had been very impressed by the stories and very much inspired the idea of writing extremely short stories – sort of short stories for both writers and readers with short attention spans. (I personally fall into the former, but not the latter category.)

During the discussion about Örknéy's work, I was reminded of a writing exercise I participated in at my former job. The other technical writers with whom I was working were concerned about their creativity and were interested to have regular creative writing tasks to help them develop their writing skills. Although I found this rather bizarre, as technical writing is essentially anti-creativity, I was eager to participate because it sounded fun.

It was.

At our weekly group meetings, we would take out a topic (submitted anonymously and secretively) from the topic envelop. Our boss would read the topic – usually a phrase or a few sentences, sometimes with an accompanying graphic – and we would have 15 to 20 minutes to write some few paragraphs about the topic. The resulting texts tended to be very short, as we were writing with pens and our hands, so used to typing, started to cramp after the third sentence or so. When everyone had finished or the time was up, we each read our texts out loud. I doubt very much that any of us became more creative as a result of the exercise, but we had a hell of a good time listening to the stories that were produced.

My brother also found the idea of writing short short stories appealing, and, during the train trip to and from Prague, we took turns thinking up topics. We would consider a topic intensely for a few minutes and then first one of us would start to scribble furiously and then the other. When both of us were finished, after 20 or 30 minutes, we would read the stories out loud to each other, often causing discomfort and fear in the passengers sharing our car.

Despite the fact that each story we produced was rather short (although the tendency was toward longer stories), we produced a rather large body of writing. Some of which has some mild literary merit. And it was a lot of fun.