Over at the SFWA blog, there is a discussion of short stories, and this is a part of it:
There is a story I’ve never published and never submitted called “The Magic Box,” about computers. I wrote it way back in the ‘80s when computers were brand new things. The damn thing ran 30-40 pages. “The Magic Box” had one good line in it. I know because I took a black marker and started removing things from the story that didn’t work. When I was done, I had one line. Our hero gets into an elevator and discovers the buttons are labeled 1-9 and A-F, and he says, ‘Oh no, the elevator has been hexed.’
That's the good line??
There is a story I’ve never published and never submitted called “The Magic Box,” about computers. I wrote it way back in the ‘80s when computers were brand new things. The damn thing ran 30-40 pages. “The Magic Box” had one good line in it. I know because I took a black marker and started removing things from the story that didn’t work. When I was done, I had one line. Our hero gets into an elevator and discovers the buttons are labeled 1-9 and A-F, and he says, ‘Oh no, the elevator has been hexed.’
That's the good line??