In Which, In Six, We Celebrate by Saying More With Less
Plus: "The Heart of the Memoir" contest; making the insignificant significant in writing; six-word reviews; and more (and yet: less)
Celebrating the Six Word Way
“Even as a writing professor who has used Six-Word Memoirs as a writing prompt with my students, I was blown away by how truly memorable, meaningful, and magical six words can be. I could not love my Six Word Wishes book more.”
— Melanie Abrams, UC Berkeley creative writing professor who recently had a big birthday filled with small, meaningful stories from loved ones
I am incredibly lucky that my work has brought me to so many places where I’ve experienced the power and joy of Six-Word Memoirs:
Elementary classrooms and college lecture halls
Churches, synagogues, and mosques
Corporate environments — from a Dell marketing conference to a Shop Rite franchise owners conferences (that was, no kidding, a wild one!)
Parties where guests use the six word form to get to the essence of why they love and appreciate the people they’re celebrating.
To say that that new Six Word app — which makes it easy for anyone to create engagement and community with Six-Word Memoirs — is a long time coming is an understatement.
My next statement is not.
Six Word Wishes, powered by the app, is the best way for anyone to create a six word topic, share it, and curate the collected stories in a beautiful, custom made Six-Word Memoir book.
I’m proud of the process and the product that we’ve produced. And I’m excited to announce that the first six people (see what I did there?) who contact me with a six-word reason why they want to make a Six Word Wishes book get to use the app and receive a book for free. Everyone else who references this newsletter for the next month (until March 31, 2023) can receive their own book for just $99.
SixContest #150: The Heart of the Memoir
—Deniz Aya, Kansas City Art Institute
Heart wants what the brain doesn't. —Neesha Hussein
Heart-to-heart: A vital way to communicate. —Jayne McKenzie
Can’t look at heart donor’s picture. —Tonia Hall
Valentine's Day has passed us by. While discounted candy deals eventually end, our many expressions of love persist. Social media and technology consume so much of our time, which makes it essential for each of us to step back and give our undivided attention to the important people and values in our lives. For SixContest #150, we'd like you to consider what matters to you most, and to include the word "heart" in your memoir.
How do you describe what matters to you in six words? Consider individual values, community spirit, and burning passions. Feel free to interpret the word "heart" literally, conceptually, or in any creative manner. Since we launched this contest in late February, you’ve responded with what are among the most thoughtful, heart-expanding responses I’ve ever seen in all my years of running SixContests.
If you'd like to share a backstory (we love reading them!), be sure to submit your entry as a Six-Word Memoir and include the link to the backstory in the comments on the contest page. Share as many stories as you like, but do post only one entry per comment. As community member Krystyna Fedosejevs reminds us: “Hearts of memoirs tick in sixes.”
Craft of Writing Tip #12: Make the insignificant significant
Stories of great histories or worldly events can often seem daunting to both writers and readers. It can be hard to know where to start or how to tackle something so big or important. So don’t start with great histories, start with a single character in that history, a single moment, a single word — seemingly insignificant to its greater world, but vital to a single character’s story. Zoom in.
Flipping the perspective, perhaps the story you want to tell is that of a single moment some small anecdote of little importance. Maybe you shy away from this story, afraid that no one will care for something so small and isolated. The key here is to make your story significant: What is happening in the world surrounding that allows this story to take place? Why does this story matter to you? Why should it matter to the reader? Zoom out.
This idea can be seen in community member Showbiscuits’ Six-Word Memoir, “I struggled to celebrate America yesterday,” posted on July 5th. There is a specificity to the writing in this memoir’s personalization (the use of the word “I”), but also a greater connection to a larger context (the context of place — “America” — and time — yesterday, being July 4th). “I struggled to celebrate America yesterday” is an approachable narrative because it is specific to one person’s story but also exists within the greater worldly context of America’s current socio-political state. Here are a few more Six-Word Memoirs that — in just a half-dozen well-chosen and structured words — make the insignificant significant. —Dale Tanner
Painted pink, but I wanted blue. –Ace-of-hearts
Been to more funerals than supermarkets. –J3nny
I am always missing the sunrise. –RenRen
Christmas was kiss; birthday was tears. – Elenastargazer
She's broken more bones than hearts. —Neesha101
Short Cuts: Six-Word Reviews
From Substack: When you're reading Airplane Mode with Liz Plank (tagline: “Your dose of news, minus the depression”), it feels more like a personal conversation than a newsletter. Plank draws on her experience as an award-winning journalist, author, and columnist at MSNBC and finds inspiration in her childhood memories and current events. Plank notes that she created Airplane Mode as a community to share inspiring news, cultural identities, and musings on mental health. From combative beige underwear to intentionally boring resolutions, she encourages us to question our own longstanding habits that may no longer serve us well and and open up ourselves to more positive pathways.
Six-Word Memoir's Danielle Shum's Six-Word Memoir Review: "Heartfelt, frank talk: unplug, refresh.”
From the World: When narratives overlap, it’s difficult to decide which story to believe. The 1950 Japanese thriller Rashomon is perhaps the most famous example of this inherently ambiguous nature of storytelling, so much so that this contradictory phenomenon is now called the “Rashomon effect” in academic circles. In the movie, a samurai is found dead in a forest, and the audience is told four narratives by the samurai’s wife, the criminal bandit, the passerby woodcutter, and even by the dead samurai’s spirit. All tales are equally plausible, making one question the relationship between truth and storytelling. One, nevertheless, finds sheer joy in these contradictory stories!
Six-Word Memoir's Dewansh Chauhan's Six-Word Review: “Fiction within fiction; stuff for thrillseekers.”
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