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    Not Quite What I Was Planning: And Other Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Ob
    Not Quite What I Was Planning: And Other Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Ob
    Not Quite What I Was Planning: And Other Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Ob
    Ebook173 pages54 minutes

    Not Quite What I Was Planning: And Other Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Ob

    By Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Deceptively simple and surprisingly addictive, Not Quite What I Was Planning is a thousand glimpses of humanity—six words at a time.

    One Life. Six Words. What's Yours?

    When Hemingway famously wrote, "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn," he proved that an entire story can be told using a half dozen words. When the online storytelling magazine SMITH asked readers to submit six-word memoirs, they proved a whole, real life can be told this way too. The results are fascinating, hilarious, shocking, and moving.

    From small sagas of bittersweet romance ("Found true love, married someone else") to proud achievements and stinging regrets ("After Harvard, had baby with crackhead"), these terse true tales relate the diversity of human experience in tasty bite-sized pieces. From authors Jonathan Lethem and Richard Ford to comedians Stephen Colbert and Amy Sedaris, to ordinary folks around the world, everyone has a six-word story to tell.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061750915
    Not Quite What I Was Planning: And Other Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Ob
    Author

    Larry Smith

    LARRY SMITH is an adjunct associate professor of economics at the University of Waterloo and a recipient of the University of Waterloo’s Distinguished Teacher Award. During his longstanding tenure, Smith has taught and counselled more than 23,000 students on the subject of their careers, representing more than 10 percent of UW’s alumni. Smith has worked with more than 500 teams of student entrepreneurs, advising them as they have created companies of significant size and success across industries as broad-reaching as communications, software, robotics, entertainment, design and real estate. Smith is also president of Essential Economics Corporation, an economic consulting practice that serves a wide range of public and private clients. “Why You Will Fail to have a Great Career,” his TEDx Talk based on his experience counselling students, has been viewed by over six million people.

    Read more from Larry Smith

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    Reviews for Not Quite What I Was Planning

    3.5/5

    215 ratings20 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Read in an hour. It's good.
    • 2/5
      I wish these were divided into sections of some sort. I think they would have flowed better and made for a more engaging read.
    • 5/5
      Great book! Concept is a great prompt for any writer... Or non-writer with a minute to be creative.

      Read this as part of a writing class called "crafting the Short Short."
      It was one of the most useful, interesting texts in that class and in my whole degree program.
    • 3/5
      Some of the six-word memoirs are wonderful. Some are just fodder. All in all, though, brilliant bits that put Twitter to shame.

      Some faves:

      Woman with man’s name— thanks, parents! —Curtis Sittenfeld

      Became my mother. Please shoot me. —Cynthia Kaplan

      Hope my obituary spells “debonair” correctly. —Gregg Easterbrook

      Girlfriend is pregnant, my husband said. —Shonna MacDonald

      Blogging is easy. Writing is hard. —Jennifer Shreve
    • 5/5
      Six word memoirs
      Loved the stories.
    • 4/5
      This was a very quick, but emotionally pleasureable read. I marked some of the six-word memoirs for later.
    • 4/5
      Very cleverly done by all contributors. Hard to pick a favourite.
    • 3/5
      clever and witty, there are lots of smiles in this gem. A more accessible form would be on the web!
    • 4/5
      Rating: 3.75* of fiveMy Review: Deceptively simple and surprisingly addictive, Not Quite What I Was Planning is a thousand glimpses of humanity—six words at a time.When Ernest Hemingway famously wrote, "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn," he proved that an entire story can be told using a half-dozen words. When the online storytelling magazine SMITH asked readers to submit six-word memoirs, they proved a whole, real life can be told this way, too. The results are fascinating, hilarious, shocking, and moving.From small sagas of bittersweet romance ("Found true love, married someone else") to proud achievements and stinging regrets ("After Harvard, had baby with crackhead"), these terse true tales relate the diversity of human experience in tasty bite-size pieces.The original edition of Not Quite What I Was Planning spent six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and thanks to massive media attention—from NPR to the The New Yorker—the six-word memoir concept spread to classrooms, dinner tables, churches, synagogues, and tens of thousands of blogs. This deluxe edition has been revised and expanded to include more than sixty never-before-seen memoirs.From authors Elizabeth Gilbert, Richard Ford, and Joyce Carol Oates to celebrities Stephen Colbert, Mario Batali, and Joan Rivers to ordinary folks around the world, everyone has a six-word story to tell.My Review: I think this is the perfect book for, uhmmmm, browsing while you're stuck in Uncle John's sacred space. Sometimes funny, a few placed perfectly to cause loss of consciousness every few pages.A must-acquire for those facing airplane travel, and an essential distraction source for the "death meetings."
    • 4/5
      A fun little book that manages to capture the heart of a person in six words. A few of these are amazing... others, not quite so much. Many of these will leave you in tears... quite amazing what kind of a story 6 words make.
    • 4/5
      Thought concept clever, adored the execution.
      Some made me cry real tears.
      Many made whoops of laughter come.
      To sum up? Whole lotta fun.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Not Quite What I Was Planning is a book that rose out of a legend: namely, that Ernest Hemingway had been challenged – and succeeded in – telling a compelling story in only six words. SMITH magazine up the ante by challenging readers to submit six-word memoirs. The editors culled the best of those responses to present in this petit book. The six-word memoirs came in from celebrities and everyday Joes, and they run the gamut from sad to funny, deep to shallow, “right on!” to “Huh?” Below are some of my favorites:Watching quietly from every door frame.I hope to outlive my regrets.My life’s a bunch of almosts.My reach always exceeds my grasp.Anything possible-but I was tired.Young optimist: proven wrong. Prematurely old.Memory was my drug of choice.Always working on the next chapter.Started small, grew, peaked, shrunk, vanished. (George Saunders)If there’s more, I want it.Well, I thought it was funny. (Stephen Colbert)Seeking route, not sure of destination.Became more like myself every year.Big heart protected by sharp tongue.I tried. It was not enough.Naively expected logical world. Acted foolish.And there’s many more where these came from. With some, there’s an accompanying drawing or photograph sent in by the writer. The book includes an index at the back grouping by topic, which are funnily named (i.e., “religion-losin’ it” and “religion-lovin’ it”).The only thing I didn’t like about the book was that big-name authors got a whole page for their quote while lesser knowns were all mixed together, generally five to a page. Nevertheless, I found it entertaining enough that I will be checking out the sequel sometime soon.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Legend has it that author Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in only six words. His telling (and heartbreaking) reply was: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." So was born a brand-new genre which Smith Magazine has now explored in the first of several six-word books, "Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-word Memoirs by Authors Famous & Obscure." In addition to contributions by well-known persons such as Stephen Colbert, Joan Rivers, and Joyce Carol Oates, Smith also accepted submissions from hundreds of people you've never heard of via their website, where anyone can post a memoir or twenty, from which most of the book's content (and most of its best) was picked. The memoirs themselves range from the hilarious to the tragic to the just plain weird, but are always candid and genuinely human. As the New York Post said of the book, "The brilliance is in the brevity." Each memoir is an ever-so-tiny window into a real person's life, and I often found myself wanting to find these people and just talk to them- gay priests, unpublished authors, regretful immigrants, and stoners all have stories to tell. My favorite memoir? Page 25. Go read it.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I just read Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure and the companion volume, Six Word Memoirs of Love & Heartbreak by Writers Famous & Obscure. I know the first book made the rounds when it was first published, but I just now got around to it. I read it in one sitting and really enjoyed it. The idea is based on the legend that Ernest Hemingway was challenged to write a story in just six words. He wrote, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." That definitely tells a story and leaves you wanting to know more, as well.Many of the memoirs in both these little books are good, some are just silly, and there are a few that are quite profound. Obviously, they chose one of the best for the title, "Not quite what I was planning." If you haven't read this little book, I would definitely recommend it. And then of course you have to write your own. I'm still trying to come up with mine.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Another of the six word memoirs books. I like these, more to dip in and out of than to sit and read in one go. A bit like reading the PostSecret books. I prefer this volume to the memoirs about love and heartbreak. Some of them made me laugh.
    • 3/5
      Great concept, but, not quite right.
    • 3/5
      These were my favorites.It was worth it, I think. - Annette LaitinenRevenge is living well, without you. - Joyce Carol OatesThank god the suicide attempt failed. - Rhett MillerSpent longing for the seventh word. - Ron Bel Bruno
    • 5/5
      Here are some of my favorites:“I was born with some assembly required.”“I live the perfect imperfect life.”“You are all in my imagination.”“Take a left turn, then fly.”“Cursed with cancer. Blessed with friends.”“I wouldn’t change it a bit.”“Can’t read all the time. Bummer.”“Put whole self in, shook about.”
    • 3/5
      The editors of SMITH Magazine, an online "vibrant community of storytellers", invited its readers to contribute six-word memoirs, and roughly a thousand were selected for this book. Some authors are famous, most are not. Many of the memoirs are pedestrian ("Will draw for food and coffee"), but a small handful were thought provoking. A couple of my favorites:"Explained Hitler, Shakespeare. Couldn't explain self.""I died at an early age.""I hear nothing and see everyone."I found it mildly interesting, and it was probably the fastest book I've ever read. This would make a nice Christmas present or birthday gift for certain people, so I would recommend it for that reason.
    • 4/5
      There are some really funny, really sad, really pathetic, and really amazing perspectives on life in this book. Depending on one's mood, a six-word memoir of one's life could be totally different one day to the next. This is a great book to browse when you have a couple minutes here or there. I really liked it. Hopefully students will too.

    Book preview

    Not Quite What I Was Planning - Larry Smith

    Introduction

    LEGEND HAS IT THAT ERNEST HEMINGWAY WAS ONCE challenged to write a story in six words. Papa came back swinging with, For sale: baby shoes, never worn. Some say he called it his best work. Others dismiss the anecdote as a literary folktale. Either way, the six-word story was born, and it’s been popping around the writing world for years.

    Launched online in 2006, SMITH Magazine celebrates personal storytelling and the ways in which technology has fueled storytelling’s growth and infinite possibilities. We like to be both populist and aspirational, blurring the line between professional and amateur. So in November 2006, while thousands of people were cranking out tens of thousands of words during annual National Novel Writing Month, SMITH decided to lower the bar. We gave Hemingway’s form a new, personal twist: What would a six-word memoir look like?

    We asked our friends; they liked the idea. We ran it by memoirists we admire; they loved the challenge. We shared it with the tech communication wizards at Twitter.com; they wanted to team up to deliver a sixworder a day, free to anyone with a cell phone and a love of stories. With those pieces in place, we invited our readers to submit their short, short life stories for a contest—a battle of brevity.

    Soon, six-word wonders were zipping across the Net—from laptops to SMITH, from Twitter to cell phones, from writers to their blogs, from readers to one another. And before we knew it, submissions were coming in by the thousands. Folks from all over the world sent in their sublime frustrations (One tooth, one cavity, life’s cruel) and inspired aspirations (Business school? Bah! Pop music? Hurrah!), their divine wisdom (Savior complex makes for many disappointments), and deepest inner secrets (I like big butts, can’t lie). And while most of the memoirs were penned by writers who have not been published (until now), others came from household names—from Aimee Mann (whose six is like a short, sweet song) to Mario Batali (who sent a generous half dozen to our table) to Joan Rivers (as outrageous and wonderful as you’d imagine).

    We were most struck by the openness of the memoirists—and by their desire to share even more of their lives with perfect strangers. People sent us pictures of the adorable children they’d just admitted, in six words, they regretted having. One woman wrote us a letter detailing the infertility developments that had rendered her hopeful memoir obsolete. Whole lifetimes happen in people’s lives every day, she wrote, so I suspect many memoirists write what’s true at the time only to find their lives drastically different a short distance in the future.

    The enthused author of Hockey is not just for boys sent in a photo essay of chicks with sticks, plus the

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