Not Quite What I Was Planning Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure [Paperback]

Deceptively simple and surprisingly addictive,Not Quite What I Was Planningis 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 magazineSMITHasked 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.

Perfect for the American attention span...Will thrill minimalists and inspire maximalists.Irresistibly clever.The brilliance is in the brevity.You could spend a lifetime brainstorming.In six words: Gimmicks should always be this fun.Compulsive reading...as insightful as any 300+ page biography.A perfect distraction and inspiration, and a collection that begs to be shared.The pithiest of life stories.A fabulously appealing exercise both for writers and for readers.Six-word review: Buy it, keep it in bathroom.These tiny windows into peoples lives are at once addictive and illuminating, challenging and accessible.Smith seems to have struck a chord in the current zeitgeist, unleashing a torrent of self-expression not unlike the one launched by Frank Warren when he began inviting people to write their secrets on the back of postcards.