About 400 Words
It started with a simple idea, a simple assignment: write the entire story of your life in 400 words or less.
400 Words is a magazine of short-short nonfiction. (Kind of like ‘microfiction,’ but all first-person, and all true.) There’s a website (you’re here) and a print magazine, too. Each piece that appears in it is 400 words in length or shorter. It’s a literary magazine for people with short attention spans and over-abundant curiosity. Every issue of 400 Words covers a theme. The short responses are delightful in themselves, but when put into conversation with each other they gain a truly awesome kinetic quality.
400 Words lends itself to being read compulsively, in small sips and Big Gulps; on trains; while waiting; and most of all, in the bathroom.
We exist, and want to exist, at the seams of sociology and lit.
Above all, 400 Words wants you. Participation is the blood that keeps this project alive. Everyone is invited to write their own 400-words-or-less about the upcoming theme, and send them in for possible inclusion on the website or in the next issue of the magazine.
About Past Issues
Issue #1 of 400 Words was on Autobiographies, and it came out in August 2005. Issue #2 is about Compulsions, and it came out in November 2006.
Here’s what I had to say about the first issue, back then:
The first issue of 400 Words resulted from its editor’s project of collecting super-short autobiographies from as many people as possible. The autobiography project was inspired by
- (1) An unhealthy obsession with contributors’ pages in magazines. Their thumbnail photos and bloodless prose that inspire one to beg: who are these people?
- (2) The mind-bendingly odd experience of growing older, and the question—what to do?—that constantly attends it.
- (3) This fact that every true story can be told about a thousand ways. Life is gigantic. What’s important, moving, or explanatory enough to make the short version?
The editor collected responses by badgering friends and by posting ads on a variety of Craigslists in cities around the nation. Several hundred people replied. Sixty-six of the most striking of those responses are collected in 400 Words, Issue 1.
And here’s what I had to say about Issue 2, back when I was looking for submissions.
Issue 2 of 400 Words is going to be about compulsions. Sounds esoteric, but maybe it’s not: is there something you do without even knowing you do it? Something you don’t have full control over? How about something you know you do but can’t stop?
This topic was suggested by a friend, who probably put it best himself:
“How about an issue on compulsions? Maybe I should say involuntary acts, or things we do without thinking and things we know we do but can’t stop. It’s actually a pretty wide-ranging topic. People notice such things only when they seriously get in the way of the rest of their life – I read a true story once about a woman who had surgery to remove her ability to blush after it interfered with her career as a TV reporter – but they’re everywhere. If you took out everything like this from life, how much would be left?”
About Me:
My name is Katherine, and 400 Words is my project. I started it a few years ago, when I was in my late early twenties and wondering what to do with my life. I found myself hanging on other peoples’ words and stories at parties, always wondering how folks got to be in the places they were. A good friend recommended that I channel all that curiosity into a zine where I’d interview people about their life experiences. That was the germ of an idea that eventually turned into 400 Words.
These days I live in Brooklyn, NY, and work in publishing. In my free time I write, work on 400 Words, and try to get out from behind the computer occasionally, too.
You can contact me by emailing katherine [at] 400words [dot] com.
Thanks for reading.
–Katherine Sharpe