When I try to explain about how to write a topic sentence for an essay, the eyes of my students tend to glaze and the chatting begins.
But when I offered them the opportunity to write a story in six words or less a la Hemingway, they were captivated.
Ernest Hemingway wrote perhaps one of the shortest short stories ever:
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
Immediately my students were intrigued. What did the story mean? Did the baby die? Did someone die? Was there a war? Was it a sign in a store? Or an ad in a newspaper?
I initially got the idea to have my students write a mini-memoir from Smith Magazine. A bestseller was created from the six-word memoirs the editors elicited from writers all over the world. I found the idea (and the book itself) fascinating. How does one condense a life?
At first my students thought there was no way they could write a story in six words. It was almost agonizing for them, which made it all the more fun for us all.
You try it.
When you choose the words, reflect on what is most important to you. Close your eyes and take a deep breath. What are the first scenes that come to mind when you think about your life? Is it people or a person? Or a major event? Something you accomplished? Something you made? A place – a setting? Family?
In our class, we worked together to create each students’ story. If someone needed extra help, I wrote his topic (abbreviated) in the middle of the board, and drew bubbles around it summarizing remarks he made about it. I clustered the thoughts as much as I could, so that emotions were grouped together, descriptions of place, and of the people involved.
It’s usually easier to edit – or cut and paste – than it is to write. If you have two or three words surrounding a topic, usually you can pare these down to one completely different word that includes the meaning of all three. This is the beauty of words, especially in our rich language.
Need more prodding? Ask yourself a question about the event or experience. Provide a brief anecdote about it. Find a significant fact or even a statistic that’s relevant. Define a term that you’ve used – etymology of a word works well. Then pare these away to the essence.
It’s like distillation: and what is created is an essential oil. Of your life.