{"id":797,"date":"2010-03-12T06:00:10","date_gmt":"2010-03-12T11:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thequicksliver.wordpress.com\/?p=797"},"modified":"2010-03-12T06:00:10","modified_gmt":"2010-03-12T11:00:10","slug":"3-12-10-genius-in-236-words-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/3-12-10-genius-in-236-words-2\/","title":{"rendered":"3.12.10 Genius in 236 Words"},"content":{"rendered":"

OK aspiring writers, this one’s easy.\u00a0 Maybe too easy.\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Your assignment today is to write a story of only about 1500 words.\u00a0 But there’s a catch: all the words in your story have to be two syllables or less, OK?\u00a0 Oh, there’s one other thing: you can only use a total of 236 different words, so you’ll have to repeat a lot of them.\u00a0 Oh, we also forgot to mention: it can’t be prose, it has to be a poem.\u00a0 In fact, it has to be in anapestic tetrameter, which goes like this, “da-da-Dum, da-da-DUM, da-da-DUM, da-da-DUM” over and over again.\u00a0 This is all pretty simple, right? \u00a0Well, here’s the final challenge: write something so engaging that it becomes a cultural icon and becomes one of the most popular stories of all time.\u00a0 OK?\u00a0 Ya think you can do that?<\/p>\n

We don’t know if Ted Geisel thought he could pull it off, but he did.\u00a0 He had read an article in Life Magazine that criticized the quality of children’s books and suggested someone should do better.\u00a0 Geisel rose to the challenge.\u00a0 He talked to a publisher, who provided him a list of 400 words that young readers should learn.\u00a0 Geisel cut the list down to 223, and added a few that weren’t on the list, and wrote a story containing only 236 simple words.\u00a0 (221 of the words are a single syllable, 14 have two syllables, and only 1, “another,” has three syllables.)\u00a0 To give the story a little juice, Geisel wrote it as a poem.<\/p>\n

The first line of the story goes like this:\u00a0 “The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house. All that cold, cold, wet day.”\u00a0 The story is about a little boy and his sister Sally who are visited by a mischievous cat dressed in a red bow tie and a red-and-white striped hat, who performs all sorts of daring tricks.\u00a0 While standing on a ball, he balances a teacup, a glass of milk, a cake, three books, the family goldfish, a rake, a toy boat, a toy man, a red fan and his umbrella.\u00a0 He essentially tears the house apart, and then, miraculously, cleans it all up only seconds before the children’s mother arrives home.<\/p>\n

“The Cat in the Hat” was published 53 years ago today.\u00a0 It retailed for $2, and a year later the price was reduced to $1.95.\u00a0 It has since sold over 11MM copies, making it the 9th<\/sup> best-selling children’s book of all time.\u00a0 It has been translated into over a dozen languages: in Latin, it is known as “Cattus Petastus” (that\u2019s a lot of syllables) and in Yiddish it is “di Kats der Payats.”\u00a0 Oy.<\/p>\n

And looking at it now, it’s all so simple, right?\u00a0 Anybody could do it.\u00a0 Even you.\u00a0 All that stands between you and literary immortality is one little story.\u00a0 236 tiny words.\u00a0 Go ahead, we dare you, give it a try.\u00a0 It should be easy…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OK aspiring writers, this one’s easy.\u00a0 Maybe too easy.\u00a0 \u00a0 Your assignment today is to write a story of only about 1500 words.\u00a0 But there’s a catch: all the words in your story have to be two syllables or less, OK?\u00a0 Oh, there’s one other thing: you can only use…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[219,360,1070,1237],"class_list":["post-797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-5","tag-cat-in-the-hat","tag-dr-seuss","tag-sally","tag-theodore-geisel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}