One Page Stories

Really short stories by Ondrej David.

Learn how to strike hard with the untold 'aka' strength in brevity.

Foreword

Writing to me was always the laziest of art forms. Anyone can do it. All the good stories have already been told. The opposite is true. Good storytelling is a skill learned and carried through generations. Great storytellers are those who surprise you with a story told a million times over.

Just about any perfectionist shares the ability to keep digging the well too deep, for the droplet of water that usually lies miles away. Accepting the fact after fifteen years I've ditched the overengineered nonfunctioning drill for a simple shovel and started digging shallow graves.

My dedication came in light with a fancy hundred-dollar pen and a small paper notebook where I wrote a short one-page story. With frequent breaks as brought by the good and bad hiccups of everyday life, I kept adding story by story, each reserved for a single page and never more.

The tone and theme of the stories reflect the extreme ends of my state of mind. Either crafting a fantasy to forget and disappear or letting go and pouring onto the paper what cannot be kept inside. Sometimes I had just a title in my mind. Other times it was a sentence or two. Out of these bits, the stories came out as if from the aether.

I've done my best to keep the stories untouched, the same way I kept my need for perfection behind.