The Power of Six

The longer I write and teach writing, the more I see that living well and writing well are one in the same.

This week in my AP Lit class we've been working with the Six-Word Memoir form. Taken from the Smith Magazine website, a history of the form is as follows:

Legend has it that Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in only six words. His response? "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." In November 2006, SMITH Magazine reignited the recountre by asking our readers for their own Six-Word Memoirs. . . Since then, Six-Word Memoir project has become a global phenomenon and a bestselling book series.

I've introduce the genre in class as we attempt to refine our writing and be more effective at the sentence level and in our overall focus. Students created their own six-word memoirs this week that describe their day, week, semester, first love, life philosophy, etc. So far, the process has been fun for me; I get to see a lot of student personality in a short bit of writing, and they get to be creative, personal, and entertaining. They get to be real. It's amazing what kind of energy the opportunity to be real can inject into a high school classroom.

I told them this week that there are three main goals that using this writing form serves:

1. Maximize your writing space. Waste no words. Say more with less.
2. Pay attention to what your audience is seeing and thinking.
3.  Know exactly what you want to say. No verbal throat-clearing. No meandering. Just precision.

As I reflect on these activities and the goals therein, I realize that most interactions we have with others each day are six-word stories, one after another, with the same demands on the author.

For we should be able to say more with less. If we make each action count, seeing the consequence and value in every word in every conversation, we no longer run the risk of miscommunication or missed opportunities. If we maximize our metaphorical writing space, in this case the minutes we spend, and try to purposefully use each minute available, relationships will be strengthened, both with those whom we already know and those with whom we should. If you only had six words to say each day to your children, what would they be? Or your spouse? Or your best friend? If you only had six minutes to spend with them today, what would your actions say? The ability to select words and actions that matter, that speak beyond the time they take, is the ability to multiply influence and grace.

And we must pay attention to our audience. To what they're seeing and thinking about our words and actions. As I said to my students this week, intentions don't really matter. What matters is the reality for the reader. Their perception is king if they are, in fact, your audience. It matters not what you meant to say. They don't care what's in your head if what's on your face and in your tone doesn't match. I had my students take an essay they had written and boil it down to six-words. I then had them exchange essays with another student and ask them to write six words on what they thought the point of the essay was and then compare. This allowed students to not only consider an audience, but to hear from them as well. 

In your interactions tomorrow, there will be an audience. There will be audience members you speak to, and audience members you don't. Some in the audience will get more words and actions from you than others. But they're all reading. And that should increase the pressure we feel and the urgency to act and speak on purpose. Audience matters. To pretend, as many are in the fashion of doing, that "I don't care what anyone else thinks," is a first-rate cop-out. It's a fallacy. We all publish, every day. Someone will read it. 

Two statements from me generally get my students' attention and focus: "Other people will read this" and "Your grade depends on this." They view everything else as practice or inconsequential. I rarely get their best under any other circumstance. We do not have the luxury in our daily dealings of waiting for an announcement that we will have an audience to answer to or a sovereign grade-dispenser. It's simply a reality. Consider that audience. Embrace the heightened responsibility for your words and actions.

Finally, we should have that level of laser-focus in who we are and what we want our story to be. Certainly we are far more complicated than a six-word statement, and our lives tell a much more complex tale. But should they? Or should what we believe in and value be so firm in our minds and so central to our being that it affects every action and relationship and conversation? And should others be able to see that story and that philosophy in everything that we do? If our actions tell various and varied six-word memoirs, perhaps we have more thinking to do about the skeletal structure upon which all the muscles and ligaments of our lives hang.

The six-word memoir has it's limitations. But is has power in it as well. And to be better at communicating in other writing forms, viewing them through the lexical limit of six is an effective strategy. Placing the same constraints and pressures in all forms of communication, therefore, should have a similar effect.