The Six Word-Memoirs

Smith magazine published a book of six-word memoirs a la Ernest Hemingway ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn.")

Here's mine: Sometimes she took the long way.

What that leaves out is this: that sometimes she took the long way on purpose, simply to put off whatever was next. The fact that this is in the third person is not lost on me, and I promise to discuss it with whatever therapist I eventually hire.

The economy of language in six-word memoirs comes easy to me because I've been writing economically for years now. In fact, I've been in a prose straitjacket on account of my job, which is to write marketing stuff for technology companies, and to help others do the same. This stuff that I (and they) write must be very specific. The words we use are very specific, and the order in which they are arranged next to each other must also be very specific. And of course, the sentences that form must be nestled together without any chinks so that no light can get through.

The end result of all of this is, of course, a life-threatening lack of circulation. Interestingly (or not; I really don't know), my massage therapist pointed out yesterday that my hands and feet also have a serious lack of circulation.

Now that I sit at my table to write fiction, I'm finding that I do not know what to do with all the extra space that possibility affords me. I stretch for elusive adjectives; I delete helping verbs; I write sentence fragments on purpose just because I can. More often than not I stare dumbly at the screen wondering, "What do I want to say?" rather than "How do I say what Client X wants me to say?"

I think about the immigrant who, when faced with the vast choices in an American supermarket, passes out and then leaves with nothing.

That comparison may be a bit over on the dramatic side. But still I can't seem to reach what's up on the top shelves here.