Six-Word Stories Exercise

Six-Word Stories is an exercise in self-reflection and personal insight that promotes creative writing skills and allows complex ideas to be conveyed succinctly.

This exercise is designed to cultivate people’s creativity, emotional intelligence, and reflective thinking through the challenge of expressing experiences, emotions, or knowledge in just six words.

Explain the concept of six-word stories, emphasising the challenge of capturing a reflective experience, emotion, or insight in a limited format. You can either assign a specific theme (e.g., Personal Growth, Challenges, Hope, Change) or allow people to choose their own theme based on their experiences or insights they wish to share.

• Encourage them not to overthink and to write from the heart.
• They don’t have to write a single sentence with six words. They can include several sentences, including one-word sentences. Example: “After rain comes the rainbow. Renewal.”
• They can first try to capture an idea with as many words as needed and then make it concise by bringing it down to six words.

Ask people to write five of such statements. Allocate about 10 to 15 minutes for this.

Gather everyone back together and have them read their statements one by one in a relay format and then continue for five rounds until everyone reads all the statements.
As each statement is read, allow people to express their ideas, praise the creator, and also say why they like it.

Moment of Reflection

After the writing phase, encourage the group to reflect on the diversity of experiences and the common emotions or insights that emerge. Highlight the power of concise storytelling and communication.

• How was your creative process?
• Why such an exercise is useful?
• Where and why would you need to communicate with less words?

Lead the discussion to the important point that if an idea can be expressed with less number of words, it is always better, though only up to a point. Too few words can make a statement vague and confusing, demanding a whole lot more clarification and negating the benefit of saving the words in the first place. The aim is to find the ideal balance.

The topics of this publication: integration, foster relationships, active listening, creativity, imagination, motivation, improvise, adaptation, improvise, adaptability skills, reflection, lateral thinking, self, mindfulness, emotions