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A piercingly dark piece of writing, taking the heart of a Dickens or Dostoevsky novel and carving away all the rest, Ernest Hemingway's six-word story---fabled forerunner of flash- and twitter-fiction---is shorter than many a story's title:

For sale, Baby shoes, Never worn.

The extreme terseness in this elliptical tragedy has made it a favorite example of writing teachers over the past several decades, a display of the power of literary compression in which, writes a querent to the site Quote Investigator, "the reader must cooperate in the construction of the larger narrative that is obliquely limned by these words." Supposedly composed sometime in the '20s at The Algonquin (or perhaps Luchow's, depending on whom you ask), the six-word story, it's said, came from a ten-dollar bet Hemingway made at a lunch with some other writers that he could write a novel in six words. After penning the famous line on a napkin, he passed it around the table, and collected his winnings. That's the popular lore, anyway. But the truth is much less colorful.

In fact, it seems that versions of the six-word story appeared long before Hemingway even began to write, at least as early as 1906, when he was only 7, in a newspaper classified section called "Terse Tales of the Town," which published an item that read, "For sale, baby carriage, never been used. Apply at this office." Another, very similar, version appeared in 1910, then another, suggested as the title for a story about "a wife who has lost her baby," in a 1917 essay by William R. Kane, who thought up "Little Shoes, Never Worn." Then again in 1920, writes David Haglund in Slate, the supposed Hemingway line appears in a "1921 newspaper column by Roy K. Moulton, who 'printed a brief note that he attributed to someone named Jerry,'":

There was an ad in the Brooklyn "Home Talk" which read, "Baby carriage for sale, never used." Would that make a wonderful plot for the movies?

Many more examples of the narrative device abound, including a 1927 comic strip describing a seven-word version-"For Sale, A Baby Carriage; Never Used!"-as "the greatest short story in the world." The more that Haglund and Quote Investigator's Garson O'Toole looked into the matter, the harder they found it to "believe that Hemingway had anything to do with the tale."

It is possible Hemingway, wittingly or not, stole the story from the classifieds or elsewhere. He was a newspaperman after all, perhaps guaranteed to have come into contact with some version of it. But there's no evidence that he wrote or talked about the six-word story, or that the lunch bet at The Algonquin ever took place. Instead, it appears that a literary agent, Peter Miller, made up the story whole cloth in 1974 and later published it in his 1991 book, Get Published! Get Produced!: A Literary Agent's Tips on How to Sell Your Writing.

The legend of the bet and the six-word story grew: Arthur C. Clarke repeated it in a 1998 Reader's Digest essay, and Miller mentioned it again in a 2006 book. Meanwhile, suspicions arose, and the final debunking occurred in a 2012 scholarly article in The Journal of Popular Culture by Frederick A. Wright, who concluded that no evidence links the six-word story to Hemingway.

So should we blame Miller for ostensibly creating an urban legend, or thank him for giving competitive minimalists something to beat, and inspiring the entire genre of the " six-word memoir "? That depends, I suppose, on what you think of competitive minimalists and six-word memoirs. Perhaps the moral of the story, fitting in the Twitter age, is that the great man theory of authorship so often gets it wrong; the most memorable stories and ideas can arise spontaneously, anonymously, from anywhere.
Related Content: Ernest Hemingway Creates a Reading List for a Young Writer, 1934 Ernest Hemingway's Very First Published Stories, Free as an eBook 18 (Free) Books Ernest Hemingway Wished He Could Read Again for the First Time Download 55 Free Online Literature Courses: From Dante and Milton to Kerouac and Tolkien Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The (Urban) Legend of Ernest Hemingway's Six-Word Story: "For sale, Baby shoes, Never worn."

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A piercingly dark piece of writing, taking the heart of a Dickens or Dostoevsky novel and carving away all the rest, Ernest Hemingway's six-word story---fabled forerunner of flash- and twitter-fiction---is shorter than many a story's title: For sale, Baby shoes, Never worn.

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The activity "One Year Told in Six Words" challenges students to write a memoir in just six words!

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The activity "One Year Told in Six Words" challenges students to write a memoir in just six words!

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Students have to choose words to efficently and effectively tell their memoir. This activity can be used in any content... just modify the prompt!

Picture credit:  https://i0.wp.com/mymedicarepartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/word-to-live-by-blog.png?fit=640%2C640&ssl=1

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Why is this an Active Learning Expereince?

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Why is this an Active Learning Expereince?

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1. Student-centered activitiy as students are writing their memoirs.
2. Memoir relates to student's life.
3. Students are using their voice to write the memoir.
4. Students have choice in the direction their memoir takes.
5. Student are actively writing and cognizant of word choice.

Picture credit: http://p6cdn4static.sharpschool.com/UserFiles/Servers/Server_1022945/Image/ActiveLearning/ActiveLearningSImplified.jpg

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Want to check out the "One Year Told in Six Words: blog post? Click below!

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Want to check out the "One Year Told in Six Words: blog post? Click below!

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Can you sum up anything in 6 words? Coonley students were asked to do just that! Chicago Public Schools has a lonnnnnng end-of-year with students in classes through June 19th. As a challenge for the month of June grades 1-7 were asked to write 6 Word Memoirs based on the following prompts:

Tell something you like about Coonley

What activity did you really enjoy this school year?

Write about yourself

Give advice to others

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Can you sum up anything in 6 words? Coonley students were asked to do just that! Chicago Public Schools has a lonnnnnng end-of-year with s...

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Six Words Memoirs can used across grade levels and content, just modify the prompt as needed. Check out these awesome "Six Word  Memoir" activities that have been used by many schools!

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Six Words Memoirs can used across grade levels and content, just modify the prompt as needed. Check out these awesome "Six Word  Memoir" activities that have been used by many schools!

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* Six words can say a lot.

* It depends how you use them.

* One's story can be expressed efficiently.

By the time the day had ended, more than a thousand Niles North High School students had been handed an extraordinary opportunity: To tell their stories using exactly a half-dozen words.

A wall-sized bulletin board in Niles North's library was empty at the start of the day, overflowing with students' stories by the end.
"I am an open book: read." "I am not just an Asian." "My appearance does not define me." "Read my book, not my cover."
The idea behind Niles North's "The Story of Me" began when librarian Beverly Zbinden heard a feature on NPR about six-word stories. She thought the concept would be enlightening for students at the Skokie high school, especially with the enrollment being so diverse.

"I love stories. I think people learn so much through stories," Zbinden said. "What I always thought would be really interesting is to capture the stories of our kids. We have such a diverse community here."

The power of six-word stories predates NPR's piece. Legend has it that novelist Ernest Hemingway was once asked to write a full story in six words for which he responded, "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn."

"Six-word memoirs are a profound and creative way to think about your life, your surroundings, your reality and ultimately yourself," states the PsychCentral Website.

For the students of Niles North High School, the mini-memoirs were meant to accomplish all of those things and more.

The project feels at home as part of the current Coming Together in Skokie and Niles Township program on race. It also was an important part of District 219's Race Week activities leading into the celebration of Black History Month in February.

Classes filed in all day Jan. 26 to hear about the project. No one was mandated to write their story, but many seemed to want to give it a full-out effort.

"What people see are the superficial pieces of who we are," said District 219 Director of Equity, ELL Corrie Wallace, talking to an afternoon class. "It's some identifying characteristic - your hair color, texture, whether you wear glasses. But what people don't know about me and about you and about all of us is all of those other pieces who make us who we are."

The value of the project lay not only in the students' final six words but the process in getting there. Students first engaged in a candid conversation about defining themselves from their own experiences.

One American-born student complained how tired she is of being told to go back to her own country - even though she was born here. Students were also handed sheets titled "Defining Ourselves," which allowed them to list their insights, to look inward in a different way before choosing those six key words.

"I want students to be empowered and know it's important for them to be able to tell their own stories," Wallace said. "And for their perspective to be shared and to be aware of who we are."

In other schools, the enrollment is often more homogenous. The diversity of students at Niles North, educators believe, makes it even more important that they have opportunity to tell their own stories, share their perspectives, define themselves in ways that transcend stereotypes.

"Even though race is a social construct," Wallace said, "racism is very real. I think (the project) is making students think in ways in which they may not have before, which is great."
Without Love I believe in nothing. Weird does not mean socially awkward. I am a perfectly imperfect person. Don't confine me. I will succeed.
"Our students have really powerful stories," said English teacher Ivan Silverberg who also helped oversee The Story of Me. "This project is a pretty cool way to capture some of those stories. I think one of the ideas is to build a living archive, an oral tradition that we can tap into year after year."

That's possible because plans call for The Story of Me to become an annual event at Niles North. Not only does that mean the school will build an extraordinary mini-memoir archive, but students will be able to see their own changes over four high school years.

"People here have so many different experiences to share," Silverberg said. "Imagine not only the number of stories but the variety of stories that we have just within these concrete walls."
misaacs@pioneerlocal.com

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coming together in skokie and niles township

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Niles North students tell their stories in six words

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Six words can say a lot. * It depends how you use them. * One's story can be expressed efficiently. By the time the day had ended, more than a thousand Niles North High School students had been handed an extraordinary opportunity: To tell their stories using exactly a half-dozen words.

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"There will never be a first graduating class again. They have trailblazed. They are setting the path. They will establish many of the traditions that will continue on for years to come." -Peter McKnight, Principal of the Drew Charter School...

Sandy Parks, librarian at Skyline Middle School in Harrisonburg, Virginia, discovered Six-Word Memoirs when she read our book for teens: I Can't Keep My Own Secrets: Six-Word Memoirs by Teens Famous and Obscure. Parks saw an opportunity to create a lesson...

The Six Words concept has followed English teacher Andrea Vinikoff throughout her life, starting in high school and continuing in college when she was assigned Six-Word Memoirs in some of her classes. When the Virginia Beach native became a teacher, she...

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"There will never be a first graduating class again. They have trailblazed. They are setting the path. They will establish many of the traditions that will continue on for years to come." -Peter McKnight, Principal of the Drew Charter School...

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Six Word Memoirs in Elementary Schools with Illustrations

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Six Word Memoirs in Elementary Schools with Illustrations

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"The constraint fuels rather than limits our creativity."

In 2006, Larry Smith presented a challenge to his community at SMITH Magazine: How would you tell your life's story if you could only use six words? The question, inspired by the legend that Hemingway was once challenged to write an entire novel in just six words, spurred a flurry of responses - funny, heartbreaking, moving, somewhere between PostSecret and Félix Fénéon's three-word reports. The small experiment soon became a global phenomenon, producing a series of books and inspiring millions of people to contemplate the deepest complexities of existence through the simplicity of short-form minimalism. The latest addition to the series, Things Don't Have To Be Complicated: Illustrated Six-Word Memoirs by Students Making Sense of the World, comes from TEDBooks and collects dozens of visual six-word autobiographies from students between the ages of 8 and 35.

In the introduction, Smith speaks to the liberating quality of constraints:

As an autobiographical challenge, the six-word limitation forces us to pinpoint who we are and what matters most - at least in the moment. The constraint fuels rather than limits our creativity.

The micro-memoirs are divided into four sections - grade school, high school, college, and graduate school - and touch, with equal parts wit and disarming candor, on everything from teenagers' internal clocks to the escapism of Alice in Wonderland.

Things Don't Have To Be Complicated comes on the heels of TED's The Science of Optimism: Why We're Hard-Wired for Hope and offers an inadvertent yin to its yang.

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things don\'t have to be complicated: illustrated six-word memoirs by students making sense of the world

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Illustrated Six-Word Memoirs by Students from Grade School to Grad School

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In 2006, Larry Smith presented a challenge to his community at SMITH Magazine : How would you tell your life's story if you could only use six words? The question, inspired by the legend that Hemingway was once challenged to write an entire novel in just six words, spurred a flurry of responses - funny, heartbreaking, moving, somewhere between PostSecret and Félix Fénéon's three-word reports.