I just recently stumbled upon Six Sentences, a blog that invites you to write about anything so long as it be six sentences long – no more, no less. Rather than clean or grade, I elected to spend the last hour of my life tooling around over there, and it’s full of some pretty interesting and highly readable material. In fact, I recommend it. Highly, even.
Inspired, here’s the first six sentences of a piece that I’ve been tooling around with all day. My students are just beginning narrative writing, and since I’m on this little kick where I try to model what I’m asking them to do, I’ve started writing my own narrative as well. I suppose the appropriate thing would be to submit my piece to the folks over at Six Sentences, but to be honest I've recently found myself a bit light on ideas for “pretty”, so I’m keeping this one here for now. Enjoy?
The Note
From as far back as I can remember poor spelling has always been my Achilles heel, and thanks to Catholic schools filled with nuns who’d rather hold spelling bees than prepare an actual lesson, I got the opportunity to flaunt my flaw with humiliating frequency. Though an avid reader, a strong writer and overall quite intelligent, I was always the worst speller in my class. Whenever we had class spelling bees (which my memory insists was constantly), I had to brace myself for the same inevitable, unavoidable conclusion: I’d be certain to miss the first - or, if I was lucky, the second - word and would have to spend the remainder of the afternoon burning with shame while listening to my classmates spell, spell on. In a class of only seventeen it became my unfortunate claim to fame, for it was common knowledge that Matt was the best at math, Jenny was the prettiest, Faith the nicest, Kendra the scariest, Stephen had the worst cold sores, and Maggie couldn’t spell. Although it didn’t occur to me at the time, I’m sure this is why Sr. Marie immediately had me pegged as the author of THE NOTE, a single-sentence found abandoned on the floor of my 8th grade classroom so vile, evil and reprehensible that my teacher dedicated four hours of class time to sniffing out the culprit, obtaining a confession, and then leading a class prayer service for the author. And since I was the only person in the class who would spell the word “whore” that way, three of those four hours were dedicated to me.
Inspired, here’s the first six sentences of a piece that I’ve been tooling around with all day. My students are just beginning narrative writing, and since I’m on this little kick where I try to model what I’m asking them to do, I’ve started writing my own narrative as well. I suppose the appropriate thing would be to submit my piece to the folks over at Six Sentences, but to be honest I've recently found myself a bit light on ideas for “pretty”, so I’m keeping this one here for now. Enjoy?
The Note
From as far back as I can remember poor spelling has always been my Achilles heel, and thanks to Catholic schools filled with nuns who’d rather hold spelling bees than prepare an actual lesson, I got the opportunity to flaunt my flaw with humiliating frequency. Though an avid reader, a strong writer and overall quite intelligent, I was always the worst speller in my class. Whenever we had class spelling bees (which my memory insists was constantly), I had to brace myself for the same inevitable, unavoidable conclusion: I’d be certain to miss the first - or, if I was lucky, the second - word and would have to spend the remainder of the afternoon burning with shame while listening to my classmates spell, spell on. In a class of only seventeen it became my unfortunate claim to fame, for it was common knowledge that Matt was the best at math, Jenny was the prettiest, Faith the nicest, Kendra the scariest, Stephen had the worst cold sores, and Maggie couldn’t spell. Although it didn’t occur to me at the time, I’m sure this is why Sr. Marie immediately had me pegged as the author of THE NOTE, a single-sentence found abandoned on the floor of my 8th grade classroom so vile, evil and reprehensible that my teacher dedicated four hours of class time to sniffing out the culprit, obtaining a confession, and then leading a class prayer service for the author. And since I was the only person in the class who would spell the word “whore” that way, three of those four hours were dedicated to me.
2 Comments:
Oooh! Fun! I love your six sentences, and I want to hear more!
you would love jerome stern's _microfiction_ or for memoir in easy bits: _In Short_...check them out. i bet you could get copies on amazon dirt cheap!
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