{"id":91488,"date":"2015-03-17T12:50:18","date_gmt":"2015-03-17T16:50:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=91488"},"modified":"2016-07-01T11:14:01","modified_gmt":"2016-07-01T15:14:01","slug":"six-word-stories-memoirs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2015\/03\/17\/six-word-stories-memoirs\/","title":{"rendered":"A slew of six-word stories from the Bates community, and a few videos too"},"content":{"rendered":"

Whether it’s a 140-character Tweet, a six-word story or a 150-page senior thesis, effective writing must rise to a specific challenge, says Hillory Oakes, the college’s director of writing and director of the Peer Writing and Speaking Center.<\/p>\n

\"Hillory<\/a>

Hillory Oakes<\/p><\/div>\n

“You must be able to get to the point,” she says.<\/p>\n

That’s the message behind a fun annual event, the college’s Six-Word Story contest, held during February’s International Writing Centers Week.<\/p>\n

“What I love best is that we get entries from all over campus \u2014 from faculty, staff, and students of all years,” Oakes says.<\/p>\n

The six-word story concept is based on the story, probably apocryphal, that Ernest Hemingway once won a bet that he could write a “novel” in six words. His six-word story: “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.”<\/p>\n

The Bates contest solicits both stories and memoirs, the latter a nod to the Smith<\/a> magazine project that, since 2006, has crowd-sourced around a million six-word life stories.<\/p>\n

Recently, Oakes and her team shared with the campus the best of the six-word stories and memoirs \u2014 they’re published below, along with a few crowd-sources videos. They also called out the first three entries for “Special Achievement in Metawriting.”<\/span><\/p>\n

“I loved that they focused on the writing process,” Oakes says, which speaks to one of the key messages of the Writing at Bates program: “We are all writers at Bates.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Best of the 2015 Six-Word Stories<\/h3>\n

“This memoir’s boring.” Ctrl A Delete
\n\u2014 Nathan Faries, lecturer in Asian Studies<\/em><\/p>\n