Life is short. Get the best
No evidence found. Murderer went unpunished. Brevity is a key to success when one needs to present one’s ideas in a limited number of words. Six-word memoirs and six-word fictional stories are hard to write, though, reading somebody else’s examples, one may notice that most of people have fun while doing that. Practice makes perfect when it comes to writing and only after writing hundreds of short sentences one will be able to choose two or three of those which can be recognized as six-word memoirs or six-word fictional stories. Concentrating at the essence of life will help to write a six-word memoir; when making up my six-word fictional story, I ran to a conclusion that the best stories were those which came to my mind first. A six-word fictional story is a work of fiction because it presents unreal facts, while a six-word memoir is a work of non-fiction which presents reality and is able to evoke a certain response in a reader.
Looking through numerous examples of six-word memoirs, I got convinced that not all of them should concern the events which took place in the life of a person who wrote it. In other words, this is not a description of the person’s achievements or the places he/she once visited; however, some of the memoirs may still be about marital status or family problems. I realized that the most important in writing a six-word memoir is to convey the essence of one’s personality and the attitude towards one’s life which, according to Schwarz, has been influenced by “who you were, who your family was once upon a time” (Schwartz 400). Therefore, I believe that my six-word memoir “Life is short. Get the best” characterizes me as a person and lets those people who know me realize that this memoir is all about my life. Though this memoir does not directly describe the events from my life, it shows what I value in this life. It expresses exactly who I am, who I was, and who I will always be, which allows considering it a memoir.
Six-word fictional stories are somewhat more difficult to write because one has to apply imagination for this. Schwartz states that to write a fiction, one needs “to create a world from the ground up, the imagined minutiae of the life of characters [one invents]” (Schwarz 400). A six-word fictional story makes the reader able to suggest what could have happened in the story. Great imagination is crucial here though at first it seems impossible to be brief and creative at one and the same time. Nevertheless, those who have no imagination for the moment of writing a six-word fictional story should bear in mind that the most important criteria for it is to be fictional. Thus, my six-word fictional story “Evidence not found. Murderer went unpunished” may be regarded as such because it is invented and because it helps suggesting what happened in the story. For instance, it is clear that a murder took place; it was followed by an investigation and a trial in the course of which no evidence was found and the case had to be closed, which let the murderer avoid the punishment.
According to Schwarz, the most vivid feature which distinguishes a memoir and a fictional story is that “the voice of memoir … can evoke a quick response” (401), as well as it can form certain attitude about a person who wrote a memoir. Fictional story, in its turn, evokes only emotions and does not allow shaping an opinion about its writer, since what it represents does not reflect the writer’s inner characteristics.
In sum, six-word memoirs and six-word fictional stories demand brevity from the writer. The main difference between them is that a memoir evokes response in a reader, while a fictional story is not real and can only evoke emotions about the characters presented in it rather than about the writer.
Works Cited
Schwarz, Mimi. Memoir? Fiction? Where’s the Line? Pearson Longman, 2005.