Competition | 7 March 2009

In Competition No. 2585 you were invited to submit the memoirs of ten famous figures from history or ten well-known fictional characters, using only six words. In response to a ten-dollar bet that he couldn’t write a six-word short story, Hemingway came up with the haunting mini-masterpiece ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’. Which, as well as inspiring this challenge, spawned an enormously successful contest, run by the online magazine Smith, that invites readers to tell their life story in half-a-dozen words.
Autobiography is not traditionally associated with brevity but perhaps keeping it concise is the way to go in an age of shrinking attention spans. Which is not to say that the briefest of sketches cannot give the reader hours of speculative fun filling in the gaps.
It was a large entry. Commendations to D.A. Prince (‘Bright spark; great plot; fuse failed’: Guy Fawkes); W.J. Webster (‘Yes, I did IT my way’: Bill Gates); George Simmers (‘I always paid the full whack’: Max Mosley); Paul Griffin (‘To me, life was a mystery’: Agatha Christie); Jenny Lowe (‘They called me the Elephant Man’: Hannibal); Derek Morgan (‘Not in a rush, are you?’: Ancient Mariner); and John O’Byrne and Marion Shore (‘I had a whale of a time!’: Captain Ahab). The winners, printed below, get £20 each. For those not fluent in Morse code, Bill Greenwell’s Samuel Morse sixer translates as: In life I cut a dash.

Piglet: I am brainless. Bear with me.
God: A six-day week, before endless holidays.
Benjamin Button: From 80 to 0 in 80.
Samuel Beckett: My bails, my bat, howsoever close.
Samuel Johnson: Birthnight, Strifeful, Writative, Lifetime, Death’s-Door, Partage.
Nell Gwyn: Oranges are not the only fruit.
Mark Twain: Reports of my life are exaggerated.
Samuel Morse: .. -. .-.. .. ..-. . .. -.-. ..- – .- -.. .- … ….
Julius Caesar: Veni, vidi, vici, vivi, exeo, vale.