If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend the book The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories by hitRECord and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

If you haven’t heard of it before (which I hadn’t), it’s an open collaborative production company in which anyone can collaborate, via the website, in various forms of artistic mediums: stories, art, music, etc. The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories is a collaboration of – you guessed it – very tiny stories with accompanying illustrations. They’re from all different artists and writers and it makes for a very compelling and inspiring 10 minutes, as that is about the longest it will take you to read it. And that’s with taking time to examine the illustrations.

I’ve always been a fan of short-and-sweet inspiring art forms. OneSentence, PostSecret, A Softer World.

They challenge someone to choose their words carefully, to actually think about the weight of every word they are saying before they express themselves. Tiny Stories has the same sentiment. It’s not only short and sweet, it’s at times melancholy, sometimes humorous, often thought-provoking. Some of the tiny stories make you laugh. Some of them make you sad. But almost all of them make you re-read them, examining each and every word for the hidden meaning – or double meaning – or triple meaning – that you know is there.

All accompanied by tiny, pretty pictures.

And my personal favorite:

“If I read our story backwards,
it’s about how I un-broke
your heart, and then we were
happy until one day, you
forgot about me forever.”