Creative Writing

Single Sentence Poem (or Short Prose) Challenge

Inspired by Emily Dickinson and other writers

After the enthusiastic response to the Ten Word Story Challenge created by Sheri Jacobs, I decided to invite everyone to try the following challenge that I often use myself when writing and that I’ve assigned in many of my classes, too. I hope you enjoy it.

Write a poem or short prose piece in one sentence

The idea of this challenge is that you stretch your ideas of a sentence, letting one sentence flow across several lines of poetry or throughout a paragraph of fiction or nonfiction prose so that your complete poem or short-short story is made up of only one sentence.

Guidelines and tips to consider

The only “rule” for this challenge is that your poem or story be made up of no more than one (grammatical) sentence. Your sentence can use any punctuation that you want such as commas, semicolons, dashes, parentheses, etc, but please (pretty much!) follow the rules of punctuation.

If you’re writing your piece as a poem, you can use one stanza or many stanzas, but just one sentence (so if you have multiple stanzas, your one sentence would stretch across them).

If you’re writing prose, your piece will consist of one paragraph that is also a single sentence of whatever length you choose.

Your poem or paragraph can be as long or as short as you prefer, as long as it’s (you guessed it) made up of one sentence.

Think about the sense of pace and movement in your piece. When a piece of writing has long lines and/or goes on for a long time without punctuation, this tends to create a faster pace, but a piece with shorter lines or which is broken up by punctuation tends to move more slowly.

If you’re writing a poem, what’s the relationship between the sentence and the line, as the sentence continues and the lines break? Even though your sentence won’t end until the end of the poem, you can slow the reader down, especially at your line-ends (where the eye naturally pauses while reading) and even more so with tools like colons and dashes.

A handful of examples to enjoy

Dashes make me think of Emily Dickinson, who wrote a poem about a train that goes on for four stanzas while only having one sentence. Maybe she chose this intentionally so that her poem moved along like the train? See what you think…

For other examples, check out this single-sentence poem by Linda Pastan, and this series of one-sentence stories by Bruce Holland Rogers.

My own single-sentence poem

Here’s a poem of mine that follows this challenge. It has one sentence that moves across a short series of couplets. It originally appeared in an online magazine called One Sentence Poems (which is a cool place to send poems if you end up enjoying this way of writing!).

Miss Match

With the pen we won playing Skee-Ball I want to tell you how I used to

believe I fit the world like a glove stuck in a sock drawer, but with you

I can laugh at any admonishment as though it were blinking

in tiny green and orange lights the way the Skee-Ball machine told us

“Try Harder!” when we would miss its near-impossible bullseye.

I look forward to reading your work!

Please let me know in the comments if you have any questions about this challenge. Remember that it can be a poetry or a prose piece, so if you don’t enjoy writing poetry, what about a single-sentence paragraph?

I’d love to read your work, so please feel free to tag me if you participate, but of course you don’t have to. I think it also helps to tag some writers to participate as it keeps the challenge going, but again, no pressure — do what feels best to you.

Here are a few tags to get the ball rolling… J.R. Spiers, Min L, Gerald Washington, Jane Smallwood, Carolyn Hastings, Denise Larkin, MN, Ali, Gina Kimmel, Mona S Gable, Warren "Storyteller" Brown, Preeti Ramachandran, Vidya Sury, Collecting Smiles, Ellie Jacobson, Lucy Socha, River Lee, pockett dessert, Mulan, Daniella Montage, Denise Darby, Natasha Nichole Lake, Sadie Seroxcat, Esther Spurrill-Jones, Connie Song, Shameem Anwar, Sahil Patel, and last but certainly not least Carmellita (who I know is busy but I thought might get a kick out of this for a poetry exercise).

P.S. Thanks again to Shari for writing up the ten word challenge in the first place, and to Lo Everlasting who tagged me to participate. My tiny stories received way more responses than I’d imagined they would, and I really appreciate everyone reading them, commenting, and sharing their own work.