One great sentence usually leads to more great sentences

Long ago and far away, when the web was mysterious and Facebook, Twitter, etc., did not even exist (that is, in 2002), people experimented online in all sorts of ways with the goal of bringing people together and creating something new.

One of those experiments was something called "One Sentence Stories," which was a spin-off from the six-word story craze that grew from a probably apocryphal Hemingway quote about the shortest story he ever wrote: "For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn." Expanding from a strict limit of six words to a limit of one sentence appealed to many.

Here are a few examples of one sentence stories I gathered:

The last piece of advice that my mother ever gave me was, "Don't dip your fries in the ice cream."

I think the worst thing about being in nursing school and working full-time is coming home at night to find that my roommates made tacos without me.

My grandmother asked me my favorite part of 'Titanic' when we saw it at the movies when I was six, and I replied, "When everyone fell asleep in their floaties."

Here is an archive of a few more of the thousands of sentences www.onesentence.org gathered from 2002-2014.

Of course, to describe these one-sentence exercises as true stories is a stretch. The best stories include the four vital pieces: setting, characters, conflict, and resolution. In those single sentences, we get hints about all four of those factors but there is just not enough space to do the narrative justice.

On the other hand, I came to appreciate these focused, concise sentences as great starting points for true narratives. Each of them seems like a "tease" about what is still to come.

I am early in the semester with my Composing Arguments course that I teach each semester for Metro State, and our first larger writing assignment is a short memoir (maybe 800 words). All I ask is that the writers focus on just one or two key moments or scenes and that they, as writers, feel a significance in those scenes. 

I was thinking that each of the three examples I included above would be great first sentences for a short memoir. 

One top goal for the course is for students to understand the importance of a strong first sentence and how that can provide energy for the entire essay to come.

Taking some extra time to get that opening sentence "just right" always pays off.