In a nutshell
brevity being the soul of wit and all
During my sophomore year in college, a teaching assistant described my writing as wordy. He might have said "verbose” or “flowery.” This was the same teaching assistant who circled the word “disparate” and wrote “not a word” in the margin of another one of my papers and I was like, You, sir, are an idiot. Of course I didn’t say anything because he was in charge of my grade, but seriously, what was the UCLA English Department teaching its grad students in 1987?
The teaching assistant was dead wrong about “disparate” (it is TOO a word, Richard, look it up), but he may have had a point about my maximalist writing style. At the time, I was deeply offended—how dare you insult my beautiful adverbs and adjectives?—but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun to appreciate concision. These days, I use adverbs and adjectives sparingly. My sentences are shorter. (Not always, but often. I do, however, continue to abuse parenthetical clauses.) I admire writing that gets right to the point; I think we can all agree that “Jesus wept” is a more powerful sentence than “Jesus was very sad and wept bitterly.”
All of this is to say that discovering the six-word memoir project back in the 2010s was life-changing, in that I immediately added it to my long list of Things I’m Obsessed With.
The six-word memoir project is the brainchild of Larry Smith, publisher of Smith Magazine (no relation). In 2006, Smith put out a call to readers to encapsulate their life story in exactly six words, and the response created a juggernaut of brevity, including several bestselling compilations of six-word memoirs from writers famous and obscure (one of my favorite titles: Not Quite What I Was Planning). Here’s a sampling:
Not born a redhead. Changed that.
Birth, bris, bed, bath, and beyond.
So good, right? Of course I had to try some of my own:
Small noisy grammatical woman, holds grudges.
or
Six words is not nearly enough.
or
Mediocre follow-through doesn’t match big aspirations.
I realized as I was writing this post that there’s a passage in my recently published second book, Troika, that channels the six-word memoir vibe:
Writing is like that. The ideas dart out of the frame. The words scatter. The story itself is so simple: car, rain, road, hotel, television show, coffee, ostriches. But then the past rolls in and the car fills with clamorous ghosts. The ghosts want to be part of the story. If I don’t let them in, the story becomes a travelogue. I want this story to mean something more, something beyond We went here, we saw that.
On a different note, Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs offers an ouch-and-wow lesson in brevity in this portrait of a marriage. It’s not six words, but it is a marvel of concision.
Morning: bought a bag of frozen peas to numb my husband's sore testicles after his vasectomy.
Evening: added thawed peas to our carbonara.
It all comes down to figuring out what’s important. Concision takes time. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal apologized to a friend for a long, rambling letter because he was in too much of a rush to write a shorter one. You know what else helps with concision? Aging. It strips off the veneer and gets right to the meat of the matter—the kernel, if you will, of what you’re really trying to say.
(Fun fact: Larry Smith is married to Piper Kerman. You might know her as the author of Orange Is The New Black. Her six-word memoir? “In and out of hot water.”)
Let’s start our own brevity juggernaut! Sum up your life in six words in the comments. Or leave a longer comment! Unlike Richard, the teaching assistant who didn’t think “disparate” was a word, I won’t judge!
Updates:
•If you’re in the Santa Barbara/Los Olivos/Santa Ynez Valley area, come to Bob’s Well Bread in Ballard to say hello! I’ll be in conversation with Bob Oswaks, founder of Bob’s Well Bread, and award-winning journalist Sandee Brawarsky. Why Ballard, you ask? Because my mother and daughter and I stopped there for a second breakfast during the three-day road trip to California’s Central Coast chronicled in Troika. Sandee Brawarsky, who reviewed Troika for Hadassah Magazine, happens to be Bob’s friend from high school, so she mentioned my mention to him and long story short I’ll be in Ballard with both Bob and Sandee on August 7 talking about—among other things—serendipity, coincidences, and unexpected connections. If you’re nearby, come for the coincidences and connections, stay for the croissants, which are a-ma-zing.
•To those of you who have bought Troika or recommended it to your friends or left reviews on Amazon or Goodreads, THANK YOU. Troika is still very much available for purchase, recommendations, book clubs, and reviews. According to the Amazon algorithm, reviews help increase a book’s visibility, and visibility gets the book into more readers’ hands. (Full disclosure: I don’t understand the algorithm, I’m just repeating what I’ve been told by people who do.) Anything helps, whether it’s “The most brilliant memoir I’ve ever read” or “This was a very nice book and I would recommend it to all my friends.” Troika currently has 37 reviews on Amazon and 50 on Goodreads, and you—yes you—can bump both those numbers up by copying and pasting your review from one platform to the other and earn my undying gratitude. ❤️
Didn't have a map. Arrived anyway. : )
Started boring but got much better.
(my life, not the article!)