Via PSFK, and ultimately Smith magazine, I came across the Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure concept and book. Though I’ve not yet read the book, the teaser video (see below) is simple and nicely made, and was inspiring enough to get me thinking about poetic brevity. The exercise of constraining an author to 6 words to summarize – or capture the essense of – his or her own life, is a difficult process, but ultimately a clarifying experience.

Even though my own six-word memoir is still ahead of me, I’m familiar with a similar soul-searching process. Being a [lately silent] member of the Startup Nation community of small business owners, I joined in on a particular forum thread last year that challenged business owners to craft an eleven-word “elevator speech.” (The premise of an elevator speech involves finding yourself in an elevator with a potential investor; you had better be able to succinctly communicate the value of your idea before your captive audience steps off at his or her destination.) Before contributions to the thread morphed more into tag lines, I managed to posit my own, followed by a stinging review from a particularly sharp forum member. His words sent me back to my notepad, redoubling my efforts and grinding my pencil and eraser into smoking little nubs from the iterations. But I emerged the wiser for it. I made those eleven words dance; they eloquently carried meaning, but more importantly, very specific meaning.

Strangely, my business focus has changed enough that I don’t actively use that honed elevator speech. You’ll just have to trust me that I did well with the project and that I discovered the power in economy of words.

Back to six-word memoirs. Take the challenge yourself, and invite your friends. I’d like to read what you come up with, in comments here or at the project’s own submissions site. Perhaps first have a look at this video before you explore the site and then (hopefully) share your own, really-short story with the world.

Six-Word Memoir book preview from SMITHmag on Vimeo.

Wow, what a book. Now there are many reviews out there that surely are more analytical than mine (I should read them then), so I’m not going to review it, per se.

If you’re unfamiliar with the author, like I was before I’d decided to read it, he’s the author of No Country for Old Men, adapted for the big screen [and directed] by Joel and Ethan Cohen.

The book takes place somewhere in the western world a few years after an unspecified apocalypse. There’s ash everywhere – in the sky, in the water and on the ground. Nothing grows, food is almost non-existent (unless you include the weaker of the humans still alive). A father and his young son trudge through this achromatic new world on their way to..? If a lack of food isn’t enough to make your heart bleed, especially for the child, there’s bad ass marauders and an unforgiving winter to reckon with as well. Fortunately, the father is sensible and handy (McGyver-handy!) and scrapes up unexpected food every few days, often when they’re just about to succumb to starvation. (It was a reminder to me that I really should learn more survival skills…at least have some fresh water stashed away.)

The same bleak surroundings and their own hopeless predicament, to which they wake up day after day, are steadily rendered by the author in crisp, creative new ways (keeping me tethered to my dictionary) on every page for the duration of the book, yet I never once tired of the grim picture he painted.

So dire was the pair’s situation, and so ghastly the consequences should they encounter other desperate, barbaric humans, that I often found my eyes darting ahead, dreading what peril I might find them in next.