Write your biography in six words.

Putting one’s life description into only six words is the subject of a new book, Not Quite What I Was Planning.

This review published in The New Yorker gives you the flavor:

It started as a reader contest: Your life story in six words. The magazine was flooded with entries. Five hundred-plus submissions per day. That’s two, three words a minute. “We almost crashed,” an editor said. Memoirs from plumbers and a dominatrix (“Fix a toilet, get paid crap”; “Woman Seeks Men—High Pain Threshold”). The editors have culled the best. And, happily, spliced in celebrity autobiographies: “Canada freezing. Gotham beckons. Hello, Si!” “Well, I thought it was funny.” “Couldn’t cope so I wrote songs.”

[Visit Amazon “Search Inside” for a peak at some more examples]. 

Many of these six-word bios are quite clever.  Sounds like a great way to plan one’s epitaph.

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

This Post Has 4 Comments

  1. Avatar of Edgar Montrose
    Edgar Montrose

    "I never completely understood the rules."

  2. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth

    Good one, Edgar.

    I'm trying to decide on one. Here's one idea: "Not nearly enough time to sleep."

  3. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth

    Here's a couple from the book itself:

    "No future, no past. Not lost."

    "Almost a victim of my family."

    "I was and now I'm not."

    "My life was a beautiful accident."

    "Many hands have kept me afloat."

  4. Avatar of D. Minor
    D. Minor

    Too much time, no real livin'.

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