Six-Word Memoirs: Are You Kidding?
RSSJennifer L. Brown, Curriculum Connections -- School Library Journal, 09/01/2009
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Listen to Rachel Fershleiser introduce and read from Six-Word Memoirs
This month, 800 teenage authors will see their work published in I Can’t Keep My Own Secrets: Six-Word Memoirs by Teens Famous and Obscure (HarperTeen, September, 2009). That’s right: 800 six-word memoirs. The book has its roots in the January 2006 launch of SMITH magazine, “an online place for storytelling,” as founder Larry Smith describes it. Ten months later, inspired by Hemingway’s legendary six-word story (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”), Smith invited members of the online community to write their own memoirs.
Partnering with Twitter, he sent out these early stories via cell phone (“It wasn’t even ‘tweets’ yet,” he points out). From there, he landed a book deal for Not Quite What I Was Planning (HarperCollins, 2008), which landed on the New York Times bestseller list. Several teen authors were included in that first collection of memoirs. But young adults wanted their own space, and they got one: SMITHTeens.com. And it keeps growing. Here Larry Smith (“Big hair, big heart, big hurry”) and editor/curator Rachel Fershleiser (“Bespectacled, besneakered, read and ran around”) talk about what it’s like to cultivate and curate an online storytelling community, and how schools have responded to the phenomenon.
Did you start the site with an editor/curator, or did that evolve?
Larry Smith: It evolved. Probably the most important thing we learned [is that] your community will tell you what it wants. If your community says it wants to write six-word memoirs on the environment, [give it the space to do that]. That’s how “My Life So Far…,” where people post their works in progress, began.
Rachel Fershleiser: With teens especially it’s true: if they want to do something, they’ll do it…The big question with the user-generated media movement is, “How do you make sure you don’t have to sift through piles of dreck?” [Site members deserve] a product that’s worth reading. We let everyone publish what they want, then we curate it.
Did you provide any guidelines?
RF: You’d think “six words” is pretty strict, but teens will find a way around it, like sticking all the words together without spaces, or writing “read this now” and adding paragraphs in the comments section. The more specific and honest the work, the better. [In our book for adults, in the piece “After Harvard, had baby with crackhead”], “After Harvard” is much more specific than “college.” If you were too afraid to say that you had a baby with a “crackhead,” the story wouldn’t be as powerful.
LS: People do ask for guidelines; Rachel wrote some. We offer some examples from famous people and from regular people.
RF: When you look through the back end [at SMITH], you will find hundreds of submissions that say “he didn’t want me, he wanted her.” We get about lots of work about “feeling down, but tomorrow will be better.” When I understand why writers are feeling down, what makes them optimistic, [then they’ve got me]. But the memoir “We both hated wide-rule paper” tells me something about these two people.
And does the hyphen in wide-rule make that example five words?
RF: As long as you’re not breaking the spirit of the rule, I’m okay with it; the sentiments are more important to me than fussing about a semicolon. When we were teens, we’d write down our secret thoughts, too, but we’d write them in our composition books and hide them under our beds. These teens are putting them on the Internet. Some people say “teens are narcissists.” I disagree.
How do two people work on a book project like I Can’t Keep My Own Secrets?
LS: We have a pretty good system at this point. Rachel’s the first line of defense with the teens; she’s closer to their age. She put together the first draft of the book, then I went through it. I’m the second pair of eyes. I tend to chase down the celebrities, they can’t say no to me.
RF: There’s not an order, but there is. There’s variety and you’re laughing and then you’re crying; there’s a beautiful symphony to it. At the same time you can open to any page. We don’t work for the New Yorker; we’re not famous. We had this idea, we put it on the Internet, and [we say] to these kids, “You can do it, too.”
LS: And they’re in the same book as Taylor Swift. At SMITH magazine the storytelling field is a level one.
What advice would you give to teachers who’d like to do a six-word memoir project with students?
LS: The school thing is awesome….We have Google alerts set up, and you now see six-word memoirs being created by students from kindergarten through graduate school; we’ve seen some illustrated.
RF: One week we visited a class of first graders who wrote about chocolate, and “my dog,” and Batman and Batman and Batman. And then there are 18-year-olds thinking about synonyms and…the power of nuance.
LS: I visited my nephew’s second grade class, in South Jersey. They made their own book. We digitized it, and you can see it on our site. It’s probably better than our book.
SIX TIPS FOR GREAT SIX-WORD MEMOIRS
By Rachel Fershleiser
1. Be specific. "Homecoming king with a septum ring" says more than just "punk but popular"; "We are banned from Wal-Mart forever"—not just "my family is embarrassing."
2. Be honest. Many of the most interesting memoirs are so raw ("First time hazy. Blame the booze"; "Hung myself. Sister found me. Alive") I'd personally be too chicken to put my name on them.
3. Forget the thesaurus: Choose interesting words, but only ones that come naturally to you.
4. Use your speaking voice: With "Got three sisters and two dads" and "Hair’s pink to piss you off" you can hear them saying it.
5. Experiment with structure. Two three-word sentences. Three two-word sentences. One statement or six separate ones. Repetition can be powerful and punctuation is our friend: "Fat camp makes fat campers fatter"; "Never been drunk. Never been happier."
6. Stop trying so hard. Or "Write carelessly; edit carefully." Throw a million ideas down and then decide. These aren't epic novels or Supreme Court decisions. Just start scribbling and see what catches your eye. In our experience, peoples' first instincts are usually the best.
Take a look at a selection of original memoirs by teens on video.
Jennifer M. Brown is the children's editor for Shelf Awareness, a daily enewsletter for the publishing trade. She recently launched the Web site Twenty by Jenny, which recommends titles to help parents build their child's library one book at a time.
Listen to Rachel Fershleiser introduce and read from Six-Word Memoirs
