Write your biography in six words.
March 16th, 2008 by Erich ViethPutting 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.
March 16th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
“I never completely understood the rules.”
March 16th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Good one, Edgar.
I’m trying to decide on one. Here’s one idea: “Not nearly enough time to sleep.”
March 16th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
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.”