Six Word Memoirs
Another notable website-slash-book project is the ongoing Six Word Memoirs series created by Smith Magazine. While the questionably non-fictional exploits of writers like James Frey and Augustin Burroughs may have taken some of the shine off the memoir publishing boom, Six Word Memoirs is a hell of a way to revitalize this tired genre.
The concept couldn’t be simpler or more clearly explained by its title. Writers both famous and obscure have contributed to the series with works like the one immortalized by the first collection’s title: Not Quite What I Was Planning. Inspiration for the series came from a legendary tale of Ernest Hemingway’s response to the challenge to write a six word story:
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
These Twitter-length bios range from the trivial to the sublime, and the concept creates a mortal challenge for those writers who struggle like I do with the timeless dictum of the Strunk and White style manual: “Omit needless words.” I was once instructed by a deeply respected English professor that I write as if “you’re getting paid a nickel for every extra word you can use. You should write as if you’re getting paid a nickel for every word you can take out.”
So, so, so, so, so true.
An LA Times book blogger picks out his favorites here from among the Six Word Memoirs of Love and Heartbreak (which should be a perennial Valentine’s Day best-seller), and this NPR piece highlights some other excellent selections.
Websites Becoming Books
Aside from killing off daily newspapers and Google-izing the world’s libraries, the Internet has had at least one mildly positive impact on the publishing industry–the advent of rather amusing books adapted from user-generated websites.
PostSecret is probably the grandaddy of this growing genre. This “ongoing community art project” has so far spawned four fascinating books that display handmade confessions from anonymous contributors.
The pieces cover the full range of human shortcomings, from secret lust to family transgressions and friendly betrayals, and the effect is like sitting in the priest’s chair at a confessional whose waiting area is unusually well-stocked with cut-up magazines and arts & crafts supplies. A fifth PostSecret volume is scheduled for release later this year, featuring Confessions on Life, Death, and God.
A new entry into this genre is Kerry Miller’s Passive Aggressive Notes, which features over a hundred angry, frustrated missives hand-scrawled by pens (or occasionally ketchup bottles) quaking with barely contained fury.
The book is adapted from Miller’s excellent website which displays user-contributed examples of the lengths humans to which humans will go to avoid direct confrontation. Whether you’re a creator in this particular genre yourself or an occasional victim of someone else’s enraged aptitude with pen and Post-It note, Passive Aggressive Notes forces the reader to choose sides in the moral contest between those who eat other’s food out of the fridge and the others who scrawl bitter and grammatically careless notes to quietly punish and shame the offenders.
Perhaps the most controversial of these websites-turned-books is I Can Has Cheezburger, the online cat photo + caption enterprise that has spawned a legion of fans along with an equally ardent army of horrified detractors. The book collects 200 examples of this delightful/diabolical genre, only about 45% of which can legitimately be seen as heralding the end of Western civilization.
