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That web video shows just a few of the happy contributors to the six-word memoir anthology.

Writing anthologies and contests are tricky business. Editors comb through vast amounts of submissions, and it's hard to know what they are thinking. Most recently, Stephen King and Zadie Smith both bemoaned the state of short story submissions. Smith angered plenty of writers in the process. 

This week, Larry Smith (the unrelated founder of Smith Magazine) and Rachel Fershleiser (senior editor at Smith) are our special guests, giving us an inside look at how they created their six-word memoir anthology, Not Quite What I Was Planning.

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions (this week, each of our guests get two-and-a-half easy questions). In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:

You must have combed through a bazillion memoirs while editing the six-word memoir book. How did you organize this huge mess of content and make the tough decisions about what to keep and cut? As an editor, which stories grabbed you the most?

Rachel Fershleiser:
Several bazillion, yes. Basically, for months I read through the backend of our submission-software every night and copy-pasted the ones that grabbed my attention into a spreadsheet. Continue reading...

Eventually it was slightly over a thousand (I’m a tough cookie), and I literally turned it into a manuscript with “mail merge.” Then I danced around my room for two hours because it was suddenly a book.

After that, I cut and added and tweaked and reordered and passed it back and forth with Larry a couple hundred times until we were happy with it.

In terms of the attention grabbing six-word memoirs, I think it’s the ones that are really specific (“After Harvard, had baby with crackhead”), really cleverly written (“Followed white rabbit, became black sheep”) or just crackling with honesty (“Found true love, married someone else.)

Want to read more? Follow these links for more interview goodness with the Smith Magazine editors...

Rachel Fershleiser Explains How To Build A Reading Community

Larry Smith Shows Why Writers Need Community

Both Editors Tell You How To Balance Writing and a Dayjob