History
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
— Ernest Hemingway (popularly attributed)
Legend has it Hemingway won a bar bet by writing the shortest story ever told — six words. The attribution is contested, the earliest printings predate him, and the story may be apocryphal. But the form stuck.
In 2006, Larry Smith and his team at SMITH Magazine asked their readers to tell their life story in six words. The response became Six-Word Memoirs — now a book series, a board game, a classroom program, and over 1.5 million submissions from people who found six words enough to say what they meant.
We borrowed the form because it does a thing few others do: it asks for both honesty and brevity at the same time. A six-word sentence cannot hide behind eloquence. It cannot pad. It can only land.
Hat tip to Larry and the Smith community for proving the form belongs to anyone who wants it.
Looking for more?
Smith Magazine's theme pages — thousands of six-word memoirs sorted by what they're about: