There was an ad in the Brooklyn “Home Talk” which read, “Baby carriage for sale, never used.” Would that make a wonderful plot for the movies? Moulton, who ‘printed a brief note that he attributed to someone named Jerry,'”: Kane, who thought up “Little Shoes, Never Worn.” Then again in 1920, writes David Haglund in Slate, the supposed Hemingway line appears in a “1921 newspaper column by Roy K. Apply at this office.” Another, very similar, version appeared in 1910, then another, suggested as the title for a story about “a wife who has lost her baby,” in a 1917 essay by William R. In fact, it seems that versions of the six-word story appeared long before Hemingway even began to write, at least as early as 1906, when he was only 7, in a newspaper classified section called “Terse Tales of the Town,” which published an item that read, “For sale, baby carriage, never been used. After penning the famous line on a napkin, he passed it around the table, and collected his winnings. The extreme terseness in this elliptical tragedy has made it a favorite example of writing teachers over the past several decades, a display of the power of literary compression in which, writes a querent to the site Quote Investigator, “the reader must cooperate in the construction of the larger narrative that is obliquely limned by these words.” Supposedly composed sometime in the ’20s at The Algonquin (or perhaps Luchow’s, depending on whom you ask), the six-word story, it’s said, came from a ten-dollar bet Hemingway made at a lunch with some other writers that he could write a novel in six words. If you’d like to hear Larry Smith describe his six-word project, enjoy.A piercingly dark piece of writing, taking the heart of a Dickens or Dostoevsky novel and carving away all the rest, Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story-fabled forerunner of flash- and twitter-fiction-is shorter than many a story’s title: I would absolutely love to hear some of them. I hope you will find time for you own 6-word story, and your students’ stories, to be part of that telling. I wonder what they’d say now? This is a moment in history that should be recorded by many voices. Here are some student examples from last spring. Every student has a 2020 story to tell, and allowing only six words both takes off the pressure and enhances the need for focus. I identify with that last one! One of the best things about 6-word memoirs is that they can work for any level from first grade on up. What better for 2020? In the Times column, Smith quoted some 2020 memoirs. According to Smith, the constraints of six-word memoirs work best in moments of high emotions-the best and worst times of our lives. They have been collected in Smith’s books, beginning with Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs from Writers Famous & Obscure in 2008, on his website, and in a variety of spin-offs by other authors, like six-word horror stories. Six-word memoirs are exactly what they sound like, an expression of a memory or a moment in time, limited to six words. In a New York Times opinion column this fall, Larry Smith, founder and editor of Smith Magazine, suggested that his six-word memoir format is a good one for recording our pandemic times.
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