Help Them Look Beyond the Wrinkles

I’ve only known Bert for a couple of years, and not well at that. He’s well into his later years, slightly hard of hearing, a little saggy, sluggish and slow of speech. Until recently I thought of him as a bit of an old fuddy duddy.

That was before I saw the pictures. A friend showed me pictures of a party she’d attended where Bert was part of the featured entertainment. I won’t describe the nature of the whoopee — suffice it to say that those pictures totally blasted away that fuddy duddy image. This fellow still knows how to get a laugh and enjoy one! His sense of humor is intact. Suddenly I wanted to know more about Bert. He has become a fascinating individual.

Facing up to evidence that I think in stereotypes is a bit embarrassing. I have to remind myself that stereotypes are one of the mental mechanisms we use to make sense of the world, and we could hardly function without them.

Besides smashing a stereotype, the pictures reminded me of the importance of having both pictures and stories of our earlier versions visible to others as we age to remind the outside world of our continuing inner vitality. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren who only know us as “really old people,” are less likely to think of us (or even wonder about us) as vibrant, youthful, people who were once as fully engaged in life as they are.

Our stories and pictures remind them to look beyond the wrinkles, extra padding and slow plod and find a sense of connection. Perhaps the most useful stories for this purpose are stories of pranks and hijinks. Kids love to hear of these, even if you end with, “Don’t you dare try that!”

What pranks did you pull when you were young? Did you ever cut class? What was your equivalent of tipping outhouses? What about college pranks? April Fool jokes? Did you tell ghost stories? Write about these things and keep the young set grinning! You’ll have a great time, and probably some chuckles as you…

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

"My Life Isn't Exciting..."

“My life isn't exciting enough to write about things that have actually happened to me, so I'm forced to make my stories up from scratch.
— Barbara Park, author of the Junie B. Jones series

This quotation appeared in my e-mail today. I haven’t read any of Barbara’s writing, and I know nothing about her, but my first thought on reading this is that Barbara is rather lacking in creativity. With the right attitude one could write a fascinating paragraph, or maybe a whole story, on a blade of grass.

You absolutely don’t need to have an “exciting” life to write fascinating accounts of life as you live it. The only thing between ordinary/boring and fascinating is the ability to think outside the box and see the extraordinary in the ordinary.

That’s the purpose of this blog: To help ordinary people write extraordinary stories in about their own experiences in their own way.

Circling back to Barbara, surely she jests. Anyone who has written memorably enough to have quotes sent around in e-mail is obviously a creative writer of considerable merit. If she simply prefers to write about others rather than her own experience, that’s quite another matter.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Writing Changes the Writer

Writing stories about your life is different from other forms of writing most people have done. Because it’s so different, when you first begin writing your stories, they may sound stiff and self-conscious as you struggle on many fronts. You have many story ideas, but you may be unsure of the details or the importance of a particular story, and you may not know quite how to put the story into words.

You may struggle with the act of writing, feeling words jammed in your mind, unwilling to flow forth onto paper — a sort of mental constipation. You may feel awkward about your writing, wanting it to be perfect, but afraid you’ll fall short. You may fear that your family now, and certainly future generations, will read what you’ve written and find you dull, boring, or worse. Perhaps they’ll read three sentences, then fling it all aside in disgust!

Take heart! It gets easier with time and practice. When you write regularly, whether two hours a day, or an hour on Sunday afternoons, you’ll fall into a rhythm, and find the words flow more easily, at least most of the time. You may still hit occasional patches of writer’s block, but they’ll seem shorter and easier, and you’ll have confidence that they’ll end.

After you’ve spent dozens of hours pondering alternate wordings, smoother word flow, sentence construction, and similar things, you’ll begin thinking and speaking more fluently, and have less need to edit your writing.

As you reach for crisp, colorful, evocative descriptions, you’ll begin to notice that you puzzle over descriptions for objects around you, even when you aren’t writing about them. You’ll begin thinking and speaking in more colorful terms.

Before long, you’ll think like a writer, and your stories will gain polish. Never fear that they’ll no longer sound like you. As your writing develops, so will your conversation. You’ll begin using more interesting descriptions of things all the time, and find yourself mentally rehearsing smoother ways to put things as you speak.

Writing stories about your life not only records the life you’ve already lived, it changes the way you look at life and talk about it. It may even change the way you live it.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Give Your Stories a Voice

Do you want a quick and easy way to liven up your stories? Give them a voice by using dialogue. Dialogue breathes life into stories in a way that’s hard to match.

Think about how you tell a friend about an encounter with someone. Don’t you generally recount the conversation, in a sort of “he said, she said” manner? You probably don’t recite it like you are reading both characters in a play script, but you’ll give the background, then quote a couple of rounds of dialogue, then revert back to description.
This same strategy works in writing. For example, consider the following story clip:

When I called my sister I told her I’d been sewing this afternoon, and it had made me feel young again because it reminded me of the way Mother always insisted that I rip out seams that weren’t perfect.

Compare that clip with the following dialogue and decide for yourself which you’d rather read:

“I feel like I’m fourteen again,” I began when my sister picked up the phone.

“Oh? And why is that?” she asked. I haven’t been that age for several decades now, and in just a few years I’ll have fourteen-year-old grandchildren.

“I spent the afternoon sewing, and I don’t think I’ve spent as much time ripping things out since I was that age,” I explained. We both laughed, remembering what a perfectionist Mother was, and how she’d insist we rip out a seam and redo it if there was the slightest pucker or other imperfection.

Don’t worry about remembering the precise words originally spoken. You won’t. What you will remember are words that express the essence of your memory, and that’s what you want to convey — the essence of the way things were and how they seem to you now. If you don’t quite remember what people said, write what you think they probably said, and chances are you’ll be right.

Why not write a story today and use a little dialogue?

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Grammatical Correctness

Those who have known me for any length of time know that I rail against the lunacy of Political Correctness, but grammatical correctness is quite another thing. To be grammatically correct is to display understanding of our basic means of communication versus personal ignorance. What’s that rumbling I hear in the distance? People making the same argument for political correctness? Let’s save that for another day!

Lifestory writers are not the only ones who commit grammar infractions. These mistakes are so ubiquitous* that far too many people don’t even realize they are wrong. For the record, here are the guidelines for two of the most common offenders:

It’s/its — It’s is the contraction for it is. “It’s raining outside,” is the same as “It is raining outside.” Its is a third person, nonspecific possessive pronoun. “The tire lost its tread.” The confusion comes in because nouns use ’s to morph into possessive form. “That’s Harry’s book.”

Hints: Pronouns do not use ’s to become possessive: Our, my, his, hers, its. You can make your own hint by asking yourself, Am I trying to say “That’s it is book?” Or, Does it make sense to say “It is raining?”

I/me — Few people make mistakes when the first person singular pronoun is used alone, but when it joins another, chaos reigns, and error prevails. I can accept that “It’s me” has bumped the more correct “It’s I” in common usage, but it’s still not okay to say, “Dad took Jan and I to the zoo.” You wouldn’t say “Dad took I to the zoo.” Anyone knows Dad took me.” On the other hand, few people ever say, “Jan and me are going to the zoo.”

Hints: Remove the extra person and it becomes clear. As in the above example, you wouldn’t say “Dad took I to the zoo.” So put Jan with me and off we go.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

*Ubiquitous — Being present everywhere at once. [syn: omnipresent] Source: WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University

Finding My Voice

Exactly half my life ago I was thrilled to be included on a Citizen’s Advisory Committee to study overcrowding options for our local school district. When the study was complete, a core group went forth to disseminate our findings. In each case we were accompanied by a district administrator who was available to answer questions beyond the scope of the committee.

During my first two reports, I was terrified. My knees knocked and my voice quavered. Surely even listening to me was painful. The third time was the charm. I went to the Rotary Club, and the Superintendent himself accompanied me. He belonged to Rotary, but never had the opportunity to address the group, and he was an on-stage kinda guy. In his introduction, he began telling them what I’d be saying. I was alarmed. He kept talking. I was angry, then furious. I had no idea what I could say. Suddenly, as he neared the end of my material, a wave of calm descended. I knew exactly what to do.

I stood and began speaking. “Dr. Noman has covered all the points in the committee’s findings, so rather than repeat them for you, I’m going to tell you how I as a mother feel about these findings and how each would affect our family.” This information was off-limits by our committee contract, but the contract called for the administration to be back-up. The contract had already been broken.

I spoke for seven minutes. I spoke from the heart. I spoke with passion. My voice was strong and vibrant. The audience was rapt. When I concluded, the applause was instant and resounding. I glowed. Dr. Noman was ashen. On a side note, he treated me with far greater respect from that day forth.

That was the day I found my voice. It was several more years before I joined Toastmasters and learned to use that voice in a predictable, consistent way, but that was the day I learned that speaking my own truth, from the center of my heart, was the source of eloquence, and power.

I’ve learned similar lessons about writing. I always got high marks on research papers in school, but they were exercises in the gamesmanship of weasel wording, extensive documentation, and avoiding of personal opinion, hardly works of eloquence! I used to dabble in fiction. Those early stories were pale, transparent, and shaky as my knees had been in those first reports. I wrote piles of how-to articles with creatively constructed case studies. They served a purpose, but they hardly lit fires.

Only when I began writing my own truth, in my own voice, from the center of my heart, have my words begun to matter, to myself and to others. If I write a story about my childhood and then let my sister correct it, my father correct it, and my cousin add her two cents worth, it isn’t my story, and it doesn’t ring true. I must write my story, and encourage them to write their own as they knew things to be.

When you write your own stories about memories that matter, your words will ring true, and your passion will shine brightly, regardless of the words you use, your grammar, spelling or anything else. Write from your heart, write about what matters to you, in your own words and your own way, and warm the hearts of your readers!

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Living in My Dream House

When I was a middle age kid, I used to think about the house I wanted to live in when I grew up. I still remember the general details of the one I imagined. Zooming in on the most important feature, the back of the house featured a sort of glassed in porch with a view of a totally private yard. Nobody could see in or out.

In my dream house that lovely yard was always green and surrounded by all sorts of leafy trees. I don’t recall flowers, although there surely were a few. The important thing was an area of grass surrounded by tall trees on all three sides, with no fence. The trees defined the boundaries. This peaceful, protected, personal porch overlooking my private park would be my retreat.

This morning I gazed out the sliding glass doors leading from the kitchen onto our glassed in sun porch. Even though the morning is misty and gray, I noticed the patch of lawn is fully green now, and the tall trees surrounding the yard show serious signs of spring. Within three weeks, they will be full of leaves and privacy will return. Right now the patch of forsythia is ablaze with yellow, and a few other bushes will soon add pink and white.

Suddenly my eyes widened and my jaw dropped with wonder. I am living in my dream house! Perhaps I hadn’t recognized this fact because the yard in my dream house was flat. This yard slopes 30° uphill. Perhaps I didn’t notice because nearly half the year, this yard is devoid of green as the trees shed their leaves. Or maybe the fact that the sun porch is a later addition threw me off. But today I saw the realization of a dream.

This is only one of a number of childhood visions that have come about in the course of my life. Some call them goals, some call them dreams. I don’t care what you call them, they fascinate me and are an integral part of the fabric of my life. No account of my life would be complete without stories about these visions and how they have been realized. They count among the memories that give meaning to my life.

What about you? Have you had visions or dreams (sleeping dreams or daydreams) that came true? What stories can you write about these dreams, the way they came true, and the meaning they hold for you?

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

The Surrender Box — A Goldmine of Story Ideas

I subscribe to Daily OM, which arrives by e-mail each day with a short thought for “Nurturing Mind Body and Spirit.” I generally skim it, letting the wisdom sink in on some subliminal level, and move quickly on.

Today’s item about keeping a surrender box rang a louder bell than usual. The idea is to write down the items swimming in your head on slips of paper at times of mental gridlock, and sticking those slips of paper in the surrender box. You can read about the benefits on the article’s webpage.

The idea especially resonated with me in connection with lifestory writing. While I’m quick to recognize the value of a surrender box for calming my mind, I also recognize a potential gold mine for future story ideas. I think it takes a certain orderly personality to keep a journal on a regular basis. I don’t have that type of personality. I’m generally too involved in the challenge of the moment to take the time to journal. To reconstruct my past I must rely on old calendars, occasional scribblings, old e-mails, and my own leaky memory.

The prospect of digging through a collection of something resembling large fortune cookie inserts describing potently emotional moments, ten years after the fact, gives me goosebumps. After completing several decades of life, I realize that situations which appear to be a matter of life and death at the time often look trivial years later, perhaps even humorous. This lesson is worth passing on, complete with examples that we may forget if they aren’t recorded in some fashion.

Writing Reshapes Memory

It’s a well-known fact that writing about your memories often reshapes them. The root memory acquires an overlay of the writing experience. This overlay quickly melts into the mix, creating a new blended memory without clear boundaries between the original event, and the new construction.

I had a cogent reminder of this phenomenon this morning as I searched through some archive folders for an old document. I found a story of an exotic evening my husband and I spent with friends in Los Angeles more than a dozen years ago. Several years had passed before I began the account (which still isn’t finished — that happens too). Today I have a fuzzy memory of embellishing it somewhat, but for the life of me, I couldn’t tell anyone where the actual happenings leave off and embellishment kicks in. Fortunately, in this case it really doesn’t matter, and the story is true to the spirit of the evening.

For such frivolous occasions, I chant a favorite mantra: “Why let a few facts get in the way of a good story?” Such moments are meant for pleasure and entertainment more than accuracy in the overall scheme of things.

The evening was such fun, and the story begged for exotic imagery to do justice to the farcically flamboyant surroundings. I share it with you for the joy of doing so, and for the possibility that you may get some ideas for audacious imagery of your own.

My senses swam as the tuxedoed maitre-d’ escorted us to our table. The smell of sizzling steak, browning onions, and countless other savory dishes wafted from the kitchen. My stomach growled in eager anticipation. My eyes moved up from the art deco floor tiles to the walls of the hallway leading to the dining room. I hoped that on our way out, we could look more closely at the autographed photographs of movie stars. Older black and white pictures advanced into full-color as we approached the dining room.

A couple heading toward us stopped to look at the pictures. My eyes flashed past the woman to Nigel and Paul. Their eyes popped from their sockets as they frankly stared. If this babe scratched her nose, her panties would peak from the hem of the red lamé Band-Aid that passed for a dress. If she was wearing any, that is. It was clear that the boobs trying to spill out the top were unrestricted by lingerie. I recognized the green-eyed monster rooting around in the corner of my mind. I realized how much I’d like to wear a dress like that. Or, more to the point, to have the curves she had to fill out that dress.

Shannon fell back to my side. “It’s okay to stare. This is Hollywood. It’s expected,” she murmured.

Has writing about an experience ever distorted it for you? Has it made one more clear? That can happen too. What exotic experience have you had that lends itself to flamboyant imagery? Try a bit of audacious writing, if only to throw away. It’s lots of fun!

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal