Six little words.

six word storyOriginally uploaded by zen

Very Short List tipped me off to a collection of a different kind of short stories yesterday: those made up of only 6 words. Inspired by Hemmingway’s “For sale: baby shoes, never worn,” the editors of Smith magazine asked contributing writers (“famous and obscure”) to submit 6-word memoirs, resulting in the collection Not Quite What I Was Planning. The sharp, pithy little memoirs (“After Harvard, had baby with crackhead,” “Found true love, married someone else,” Steven Colbert’s “Well, I thought it was funny”) made me wonder: how would my life read boiled down to 6 words? Maybe “Got it together in the end” or “Learned to stop thinking so much.” Hopefully not “Wore heart on sleeve, got screwed.”