Saturday, February 24, 2007

"I'm a hopeless romantic; you're just hopeless."

Hello hello hello. It's been a very busy week, and next week isn't looking much easier, so here I am on Saturday morning... blogging my hangover away.

Nah, I don't think I'm hungover at all. I really think I'm getting sick though, which sucks, obviously. I woke up this morning feeling way too warm but refusing to take my temperature. And my throat hurt (half of that might be from the screaming-karaoke-match that we did to songs that make us want to cry). And I'm just kind of sore overall (oh yeah, I uh... "battledanced" last night: true story). But those are all topics for another blog post (especially the battledance one). My mind is stuck on my new obsession, this guy:




Ernest Hemingway. Novelist, journalist, short-story writer. Soldier. Womanizer. Alcoholic. Pulitzer Prize winner. Goes crazy and takes the cake by killing himself. I read The Old Man and the Sea when I was a junior in high school (not by choice), and I hated it. He spent a whole 180 pages or whatever trying to catch a fish, and then when he succeeds, sharks eat it. Oh, is that what they call a spoiler? Sorry. But really, I was young and stupid then. Now that I am so much older and so much wiser (debatable), I have found an appreciation for his style, prose, blah blah blah.

Anyway, so what really brought me to this realization came about while doing research this week. On Tuesday I have to give a presentation in one of my classes, and it happens to be about the genre of memoir. Killing some time at work, I did a Google search just for "memoir" to see what would come up. I eventually came across this website, which is very relevant to this class, and the thing that would make me become obsessed with Hemingway. See, legend has it that Hemingway (and I think a bunch of other authors at the time) was given the challenge to write a story using only six words. He wrote,




"For sale: baby shoes, never used."




Some say he considered it to be the greatest thing he ever wrote, and I agree. The more I thought about it, the more I wrapped myself around it. Now I've taken it in as some sort of mantra-- as a writer and as a writer who has to write her first memoir by the end of the semester. The simplicity of six words is what kills me. It's about trusting your audience to get your point without having to over-write anything. I could probably go on a lot more about this.

But anyway, this online mag decided to have a contest in which they challenged their readers and contemporary authors to tell their story in six words: The Six-Word Memoir. Winners were to be published in a book.

The winner ended up being Abigail Moorhouse who wrote, “Barrister, barista, what’s the diff, Mom?” Once again, something that reminds me of Sicily and/or the Sicily class, and I guess it's strength lies in its simplicity as well: she's just telling it like it is.

Some of my favorites were:

"Never really finished anything, except cake." —C. Perkins
"Savior complex makes for many disappointments." —A. Schubach
"Bad brakes discovered at high speed." —J. Baumeister
"After Harvard, had baby with crackhead." —R. Templeton
"I still make coffee for two." —Z. Nelson

The last one especially has that Hemingway-esque quality. Just my cup of tea... or coffee... another note to writers, especially memoir writers: get rid of the cliches.

Anyone want to give it a shot? It's kind of an interesting experience, whether you're writing a story, memoir, title, article... six words. Go.

Here's mine: "Losing faith, I found my voice."

4 comments:

Mags said...

Oooh, wow, I'm going to stay up all night trying to do this challenge now. When I was VERY little my dad read to me "The Old Man and the Sea" and I can't remember much more than a little boy being friends with an old man. In high school I had... *issues* with Hemmingway although he did intrigue me, but one of the lines from his story "Hills Like While Elephants" always stuck in my head. It was "nada y nada y nada" very simple, but it just seemed interesting. I guess that's Hemmingway.

Kevin said...

I sat around thinking about this even though i'm no writer. You took 10 minutes from my life and I want them back.(was that cliche?). Anywho this popped into my head "Born an animal, -his dying words"

Mags said...

So much yet to be seen

John said...

"She married my best friend instead."

Hi, I stumbled over you when I did an image search for the words "old man and the sea". You were on google image search page 6. I also love Hemingway. Here are six words from "The Old Man and the Sea" that I've been thinking about for a while. "The shark was not an accident."