Your Life in Six Words

It started as a contest on the online writer’s magazine SMITH.  Readers were challenged to write their own biography in six words.  They gave the classic example of the mini-masterpiece penned by Ernest Hemingway:  “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Readers were encouraged to send in their examples and the best of the best would be published.  15,000 people responded. That contest turned into a book and that book turned into an overnight sensation.  The book’s title is one of the submissions: “Not Quite What I Was Planning.”

My daughter heard a piece on the book on NPR last week.  She bought the book and we all gathered around it last night reading how people boiled down their lives into just six words.  Some were incredibly clever (“Eat mutate aura amateur auteur true”), some were stupid (“Born in California. Then nothing happened”).  Some were funny (“Birth, childhood, adolescence, adolescence, adolescence, adolescence…”) and some were sad (“Everyone who loved me is dead”).  All were fascinating in their own way.

My personal favorite: “Sweet Wife. Great Kids. I’m rich!”  A Canadian minister even came up with two six word bios for Jesus that were clever and touching: “God called; Mother listened; I responded” and “I call you friends, not servants.”

How would you sum up your life in just six words? I agree with the wife of a novelist who came up with this one: “It’s hard to summarize your life.”

I’m working on it.  As all of you who are regular readers of this blog know only too well, I can’t say ANYTHING in just six words!

Hey, I think I just came up with mine – “Brevity is Not My Strong Suit!”