Reason to Write

If you’ve had any reluctance about starting to write your own lifestory, a blog post and comment I read today should send you scurrying to your keyboard to get started.

I’ve been blog-surfing, trying to find a template with a three column format that I could adapt for my own use here. In the search, I found a moving tribute posted on October 23 by Don Quixote announcing the death of his 97-year-old grandmother. In this tribute he mentions that he didn’t spend much time with her or know her well.

This post had a number of comments, and I clicked to read them. One was especially relevant to us here:

I sat in my grandmother's funeral and listened to all they had to say and realized that I didn't know her at all. I also knew that I'd never bothered to get to know her. She was just this old lady who featured in my childhood for a while and who faded out when my parents moved us away. Stupid way to be, eh?

I could write pages of speculation about why those two never quite connected, but what would that accomplish? For whatever reason, and sad as it is, they simply didn't, and the grandson didn't realize the tragedy of that until it was too late to change things. He was left with nothing but regrets and questions.

Whatever the state of your relationship with your family right now, what greater gift could you give your descendants than the opportunity to know you later, if the time hasn't already been right? Even if you have a close relationship and have spent a lot of time together, they'll forget more than they remember, and pass only a few basic facts on the the next generation.

Don’t let your memories, stories and wisdom be buried with you. Put them on paper and leave them behind. Then, regardless of your beliefs about the spiritual hereafter, you’ll live on for generations in the memories of your family.

Have you written a story today?

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

A Context For Thought

“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.”

— Edwin Schlossberg

For many of us this thought encapsulates the underlying reason for writing lifestories: To pour our own hearts and thoughts onto paper as a context for others to think and examine their own lives, beliefs and choices.

What more could we hope for? Admiration? Praise? Gratitude? Or simply to be remembered? There are no wrong or poor reasons for writing. Writing is its own reward, and all else is icing on the cake. For me, stimulating thought in others is the ultimate icing.

And thus I blog. How sweet it is to have such an opportunity and outlet.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

True Friends

I recently found this item in my e-mail inbox. Anyone who has been reading this blog for awhile knows that I don’t make a habit of raiding my inbox for blog material, but this exploration of True Friendship deserves special attention:

A simple friend, when visiting, acts like a guest. A real friend opens your refrigerator and helps himself (and doesn't feel even the least bit weird shutting your beer/Pepsi drawer with her foot!)

A simple friend has never seen you cry. A real friend has shoulders soggy from your tears.

A simple friend doesn't know your parents’ first names. A real friend has their phone numbers in his address book.

A simple friend brings a bottle of wine to your party. A real friend comes early to help you cook and stays late to help you clean.

A simple friend hates it when you call after they’ve gone to bed. A real friend asks you why you took so long to call.

A simple friend seeks to talk with you about your problems. A real friend seeks to help you with your problems.

A simple friend wonders about your romantic history. A real friend could blackmail you with it.

A simple friend thinks the friendship is over when you have an argument. A real friend calls you after you had a fight.

A simple friend expects you to always be there for them. A real friend expects to always be there for you!

Are these statements an accurate description of the way you relate with your own true friends? I don't regard this list as concrete definitions, but a place to start thinking and writing. True friends are such a treasure, and they deserve special recognition in our lifestories. I hope you will find inspiration here to express your appreciation of your friends. Send your tributes to the friends you write about, and be sure future readers know about them too.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

When Things Don't Go Smoothly

As technology marches on, some of our toughest writing challenges have nothing to do with finding topics or the right words to express our ideas. For example, for the past week I've been writing blog entries from afar as we visit an ailing friend. I have my list of topics with me so I won't be at a loss for content ideas, and the words flow easily enough. That's not a problem.

The problem is with equipment. My wireless connection works, but not reliably at any given time. It fades in and out. The Blogger server has not been any more reliable than my wireless connection. When the two hit a low at the same time... I won't alarm or bore you with the full list of geek talk.

These are high-level challenges that most writers will never face. The more common tech problems involve things like forgetting to save a file and losing a story when the electricity flashes off, or screaming vile words at Word when you can't get a photo to stay where you want it in a document.

Here's my rationale for the time I invest working these things out: Research is showing conclusively that both writing and solving problems keep our brains healthy and supple. These activities foster the growth of new neural synapses -- those are the connections between brain cells involved in learning and remembering -- even past the age of ninety. It used to be thought that learning stopped around age sixty. What a scary idea for those of us who are "older than dirt!"

When I come upon a tech problem, like a blog that won't post, migrating graphics, a blog post with half a sentence missing or the wrong font in three paragraphs, even after it looked perfect in preview, I take a deep breath and chant, "I'm keeping my brain young!" Right now my brain feels very young indeed.

(Right there I'm sorely tempted to insert :-), the smiley face I use so liberally in e-mail, but I've arbitrarily decided it will never be appropriate in other writing contexts. I accept the challenge of finding a creative way of expressing emotive thoughts in words rather than symbols or icons.)

You'll probably never need to fix blog bleeps, but you will encounter the occasional tech problem. Even acclaimed and prolific writers like Susan Wittig Albert, author of the China Bayles and Beatrix Potter mystery series and other works, has occasionally written of computer problems in her blog, which covers a wide range of topics. If you come upon one that stumps you, send me an e-mail or post a question as a comment and I'll try to help, perhaps even with a blog-post to help everyone.

Just remember, the very act of writing is keeping your brains and emotions healthy, and solving problems enhances that effect.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Make Crumb Cake

Many, if not most, lifestory writers begin by writing short stories about various topics. One day they discover they have an impressive pile of unrelated stories and wonder what on earth to do with them. Here’s the answer:

“Crumb cake? Stories? What’s the deal?” you may well ask. Just as there are many recipes for crumb cake, there are many recipes for weaving assorted stories into a finished anthology. Here are a few common ones:

Simple story album

In my forthcoming book, The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing, I refer to finished collections of stories as albums, similar to photo albums or music albums. Photo albums generally have themes, such places and seldom have more than a few words describing date, place and names. The photos stand on their own. You can do the same thing with your stories. Just arrange them in a pleasing order and call it an album of short stories, each complete within itself.

Theme album

Just as some photo albums are about specific events, trips, or what have you, you can write a collection of related stories. This collection may be relatively short, if it’s about memories of a specific person, for example. People who traveled a lot may have a thick volume of their globe-trotting adventures. Still, each story will probably be a freestanding unit.

Integrated album
A third option is to take the stories you’ve written and tie them together with narration between. In this case, each story may be a chapter, or you may piece several stories together for a unit. Most published memoirs use a collage of assembled shorter stories this way. Go to your local library and check out a memoir or two and read them with this possibility in mind. Notice how shorter stories are strung together.

You’ll find related thoughts on this topic in an earlier post, “Like Beads on a Necklace.”

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Pre-writing By the Dawn's Early Light

I’m dimly aware of a truck passing along the road below me. Cracking one eye, I see the dark of night has given way to the grayness of early morning. I glance at my bedside clock and think how cozy and warm I am, how delightful my mattress feels, and how cool it will seem when I slide out of bed.

One thought leads to another and soon my current writing project is running through my mind. I let my thoughts wander over events I plan to write about, focusing on details as vividly as possible. As I rewind my mental video to zoom in on a specific scene, I realize the advantage of replaying the scene. I can go back again and again until I’m satisfied that I’ve attended to every available detail.

Suddenly I’m struck by the fact that some of these details are things I failed to notice at the time of the actual event. I have the advantage all these years later of moving around the scene, considering it from a dozen different angles, pre-writing until I get the story just right. I’m finding elements that were filed in memory below my level of awareness at the time. I continue to lie there, thinking of my story, what I want to include and what I want to leave out.

Words slide unbidden through my mind, offering their services as transfer agents to carry the image I hold so vividly into the minds of my readers. I select one here, another there, and the story begins transforming itself from pictures to words.

Now I’m ready to rise. I feel restless in bed, knowing that if I don’t reach my keyboard soon, all this good stuff will evaporate. It has a reliable shelf life of mere minutes. Yes, it’s definitely time to get up and write. Some mornings I’ll stop to make coffee before heading down to my computer. This morning I go straight to my desk, resisting the temptation to check my e-mail, which would probably distract me one way or another for nearly an hour. I open a new document and begin to write. The story flows forth quickly, with few hesitations or pauses.

I don’t wake up with a story in mind just every day. Not every story gushes out in this particular way, only the magical ones. But however they occur to me and whenever I write them, as words take shape, I use this same pre-writing visualization process. That engages my right brain, the part that notices colors, forms and feelings, nudging it into sync with my left brain, the logical part that gets the facts and relationships right.

Some days when I wake up without a specific story in mind, I’ll deliberately set my thoughts to wander until I find one, because that’s such a delightful way to think them through and an energizing way to begin the day. Maybe tomorrow you’ll wake up early enough to dawdle in your cozy bed, writing in your head before your fingers hit the keyboard or pick up a pen. Try it, you’ll like it!

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Writing Around the Block

Getting a book ready for press can turn into a family affair. My daughter Susan has been proof reading the manuscript for The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing. Like her father, she’s especially good at finding tiny inconsistencies, and I appreciate her sharp eye. As writers, we grow so accustomed to our own words that it’s quite difficult to them freshly. Our mind tends to replay the words we recall writing rather than read the specific contents of the page.

Susan is a talented and experienced writer in her own right, specializing in marketing and public relations pieces. When she got to the section of the manuscript on overcoming writer’s block, she commented on her own methods of dealing with this challenge:

I used to get terrible writer’s block when trying to do brochures or press releases. I found that the more frequently I wrote, the less often I’d have writer’s block.

But, when facing a deadline and facing writer’s block – one thing I did to get around my block is, literally, to write around the block. Instead of trying to write the first sentence or headline, I’d write my conclusions. I’d write my quotes. I’d write something that made fun of my topic. I’d write anything just in order to start the flow of words on paper. It’s close to your recommendation to write a letter, or write about why you’re having a hard time writing… but instead it was just another way of moving around the block. So, I’d start writing backwards, with the ending first.

Susan’s technique would work well for writing our kind of story. If you can’t figure out how to begin, where to begin, or what order to tell your story, start with the ending. For example, I’m thinking right now of writing the story of learning to drive. It’s a complex story, with memories of my mother telling how she learned to drive, my own early driving experiences, and surviving the ordeal of teaching our children to drive.

That’s a lot of story to weave together. I’m not sure exactly where to begin, but I know how I want it to end.

“I glanced over at Susan sitting in the passenger seat of her ancient Volvo station wagon as I ground the gears and stalled it out. She wanted me to have a chance to get used to the car’s quirks under her guidance before I set off on the drive from Seattle to Gig Harbor on my own. Her skin was ashen, her eyes wide. She braced her hands against the dashboard as she glanced wildly around at the approaching traffic. I chuckled inwardly, feeling ironically vindicated as I recalled the sheer terror of sitting in the passenger seat as she learned how to drive. It isn’t often that you have the chance to get even with your children, and I savored every second.”

From this ending I can build my beginning. The ending may change somewhat in wording as the story gels, but the form is set, and I've written around my block.

Will you join me in writing around a block of your own? I also hope you'll join me in making your editing projects a family affair.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions

Did you know that writing about your past experiences can actually improve your current health? Perhaps not all stories are magic bullets for healing, but writing about distressing events has demonstrable benefits, as documented by James W. Pennebaker, PhD in his book OPENING UP: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions.

This report is a summary for executives, combining a 249-page book into a few sentences.

Dr. Pennebaker is Professor of Psychology and a researcher at the University of Texas. He formulates theories about health and tests them by conducting experiments using his many undergraduate students.

For this book, the premise is that holding back or inhibiting ones frustrations is work and affects short-term biological changes and long-term health and thinking abilities.

To test the theory, students performed various tasks and their vitals were measured before, after, in six weeks and after five years. Tests included blood pressure, heart rate, skin conductivity, perspiration, mouth dryness, brain waves and doctor visits. In one of the definitive studies, he assigned students at random to one of four groups. One group talked with classmates about random meaningless events. Another discussed anxieties, frustrations and problems. A third wrote, in a private room, about anxieties, frustrations and problems. The last group discussed and wrote about their unresolved issues.

After analyzing the results. Dr. Pennebaker concludes that verbalizing your frustrations, anxieties and concerns results in improved mental and physical health. Writing about these unresolved issues results in even more improvement. The most improvement came from discussion with friends and writing about the issues. He states that writing is a slower process, requires analysis, organization and resolution. When confronted, a problem is put into perspective, analyzed and resolved. Once closure is achieved, the issue is put out of mind and no longer drains mental or physical health. The effect is similar to putting data from a hard drive onto a disk and then filing the disk away.

The conclusion, for us, is that confronting our problems in writing class and writing about them will improve both our mental and physical health.

Thanks to Paul for the excellent summary. If any of you readers have doubts about writing certain stories, perhaps this news will be the nudge you need to get them on paper and share them with a trusted friend or relative. What have you got to lose but worry, stress and a few related afflictions?

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

To Thine Own Self Be True

Over the last few days I’ve had an exciting epiphany of sorts. Everything you read about writing lifestories and memoirs encourages you to express lots of emotion to add color, life and credibility to your accounts. This is good advice. Expressing emotion does that — if you can do so authentically.

Many people are able to use visualization or a similar technique to recreate past scenes vividly enough to experience the emotions anew. Others are able to imagine what they must have been feeling and express it in a credible way.

Another group of people have never been more than vaguely aware of any but the strongest emotions. To a significant degree, the way we experience emotions is hard-wired at birth. It relates to how our brains work, and no two brains work the same way. To put it in simplistic terms, emotions are generally thought of as a right-brain function, and many people are primarily left-brain dominant, favoring thought over feeling. It’s similar to being right-handed or left-handed.

If you happen to be a thinking person more than a feeling one, and you strain to stick in some feeling words to make your stories measure up, you run the risk of sounding contrived or insincere.

If you do remember how you felt in a specific situation, and if you can use the information in a natural way within your story, go for it. But don’t agonize over it. Write your stories, in your own natural style, and be content that they will reflect you as you really are/were, not as the Writing Correctness Posse tells you that you “should” express things. I feel angry when I think people are being bullied into writing something other than their own unique style!

That being said, please excuse my absence from the blog for the past week. I brought home a cold from a quick visit to our fourteen- month-old granddaughter and her parents. I’m happy to report that I’m feeling fine again now. And I’m delighted to report that the little one has two astonishing first “thing” words: Book and A-B. That’s A-B as in the alphabet song played many times a day on the Playschool thingy magnetically adhered low on the fridge door. Her favorite thing to do when she isn’t exploring her world at full throttle is to sit on the floor with her huge collection of books, flipping through the pages and “reading” them in her own unique language.

What a thrill to watch her. Do you suppose we have a budding writer there? What a delightful prospect.

Including emotion words comes easily to me, but if it doesn’t come easily to you, if you find yourself adding feeling words the same way you work on punctuation, to thine own self be true.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Major Milestone

I haven’t written much about the book I’m working on since the very earliest blog entries. Not surprisingly, the title of the book is THE HEART AND CRAFT OF LIFESTORY WRITING. I have to tell you that I’ve been going through absolutely every challenge I write about within the process of writing the book. I’ve had to pull disparate pieces of this and that together. I’ve had to write transitions, and document facts. I’ve had to reach out on faith into the nether world, trusting that the right words will appear, and every time they have, though not always as quickly as I’d like.

The good news is that I just passed a major milestone. I finished what I intend to be the final edit. There are still half a dozen items on the list that must be checked off before it is press-ready, but I’m pumped.

Passing this milestone of having all the structure and order the way I want it, the words flowing smoothly, and the formatting under control reminds me that we need to celebrate often as we write. Celebrate each story. Revel in the glory of your accumulating pile of pages.

Some stories are short. That’s okay. Not all stories need to be long.

Some blog entries are short. That’s okay. I’m tired and I’m going to celebrate!

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal