Just an Hour a Week

This is a day that the Lord hath made.
Let us rejoice and write stories in it.

— Sharon Lippincott

I've had a busy week. Our daughter was here for Thanksgiving with her toddler and husband, and shortly after they left, I came down with a bug (fortunately short-lived). Consequently, I haven't spent time writing for a week now. This could have been a disaster for the blog, but fortunately I had a small backlog that I could pop into place with a few clicks of my mouse. My backlog is now depleted, but it won't stay that way long. I woke up with my head simply buzzing with blog/story ideas.

Knowing all too well how important it is to honor my muse Sarabelle when she pays me a visit, especially such a bountiful one, I headed straight to my computer and started half a dozen new posts. If my backlog gets too full, I'll simply post more often for awhile.

One of the insights she gifted me with was the fact that I now have ninety-four posts in this blog, which began on February 7, 2006, less than ten months ago. That's an average of approximately one post every three days. The posts average 407 words. A page of normally formatted text (Times Roman Font, 12 point, normal line spacing, one-inch margins all around) will average around 660 words per page. A page following my recommended formatting* with a wider typeface like Georgia (used in this blog), 11 point, with 15 point line spacing and one-inch margins all around will average about 550 words per page, 500 with chapter titles and section headers. Given these statistics, the current contents of this blog would fill about 80 pages with my recommended formatting.

I seldom spent more than twenty minutes per post, sometimes less, so I wrote about an hour a week on this blog. In about forty weeks I've written and edited around eighty pages of text, spending only an hour a week doing it. That's two pages per week, or about one hundred pages a year.

Just think what you can do if you write just an hour a week for, let's say, ten years! Even if you write at half the speed I do, you'll have an amazing stack of pages. Now, isn't that news enough to get those fingers clicking? Rejoice and ...

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

* Full details on this recommended formatting and how to use Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Write or WordPerfect to make it happen are included in my soon-to-be-released book, The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing. Stay tuned for ordering information.

Writing About the Wilderness

The trouble with writing about the wilderness is that there is almost none of it left, and so, although more and more writers are born, grow up and appear in print, fewer and fewer can possibly have even an approximate acquaintance with the wild destroyed world on whose splinters we stand.

—Edward Hoagland

I recently found that quote on Susan Albert's Lifescapes blog. It especially appealed to me because I grew up on the edge of the wilderness, and live on the edge of a forest today. Nature and wildlife have always been dear to me, and it's hard for me to imagine not being able to wander in the woods.

Sometime back I wrote this paragraph about the mountains of northern New Mexico:

Those mountains shaped my life and my abiding love for the woods. Alone among the towering pines, I was my own best self, free from all expectations, pressures and competition. I knew even then that the forest had healing powers. The memories from those mountains pull me back to being my own best self, and I always keep them near me in my soul.

Going beyond those mountains, I'm writing stories about exploring the fascinating reeds along the irrigation ditch when I was a preschooler, trips down in the canyon, the smell of pines in the playground, lizards and cactus at Girl Scout day camp and climbing Mt. Wheeler. In later years there is the splendor of the Oregon Coast, Banff, the Austrian alps, penguins in Antarctica, hiking the Milford Track, wild turkeys in my yard . . . the list is nearly endless. I want to share my general appreciation of the wild to perpetuate it in generations to come.

You may also treasure the wilderness. Are you doing your part to preserve it in memory as it is today? Maybe the wilderness isn't part of your legacy, but what about parks, or special gardens? Nature has impacted nearly all of us one way or another. Let the world know what it means to you.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Bring on the Turkey!

A cheery, lilting song has been running through my mind the last few days. It goes something like this:

Oh bring the turkey, golden brown,
the mashed potatoes light,
The cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie,
my, oh what a sight!
We'll eat and eat until at last,
we've had too much, but then,
Thanksgiving comes but once a year,
so we can get thin again!

I learned this song in third or fourth grade in music class and we probably only sang it one year. We learned dozens of those songs through the years, but this is one of the two or three that stuck in mind. I call this one my “Thanksgiving Carol” and I always hear it sung by children's voices all around me, with my own voice belting it out right along with them.

The tune takes me back to my early childhood Thanksgivings. Those all blur together. Many years we went to visit one set or the other of the grandparents (I was fortunate that all four of mine lived to become great-grandparents), and there were often lots of cousins around. Other times people came to our house.

It all blurs together into a composite memory of a crowded house, busy kitchen, wonderful smells and too much food. The menu was unvarying: Turkey, cornbread stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, candied sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top, cranberry sauce (both jellied and fresh orange-cranberry), peas or green beans, 24 Hour Salad (a sinfully rich fruit, custard and whipped cream concoction), and pies (usually mince and pumpkin) with lots of whipped cream.

Today the people around the table are more likely to be friends and neighbors than family, but the menu has stayed the same, true to the tune in my head.

What about your family traditions? Is your menu set, or do you scour food magazines for new ideas? Who joins you? Do you have any rituals of giving special thanks? And what about songs? Do you have Thanksgiving songs? Do you remember any songs from school days? Write it all down!

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

The Single Most Important Thing You Can Do to Improve Your Writing

Someone recently asked what I’d recommend as the one single thing they could do that would help their writing the most. I answered with one word: Toastmasters.

Most people think of Toastmasters as an organization devoted to improving members’ speaking skills. It definitely does that — with a number of fringe benefits. The primary value of Toastmasters is the practice you gain in learning to organize your thoughts. To make a point in the five to seven minutes available for club speeches, you must pare your material down to its bare essence. There is no time for clutter or extra material.

This process of digging for golden nuggets of meaning transfers into all areas of communication. Your conversation becomes more precise. If you are in sales, you’re better equipped to assess needs and define benefits with laser-like precision. If you teach, you’ll l deliver streamlined lectures that emphasize the main message in a smooth and logical flow.

Your writing will become lean and spare.

When I joined Toastmasters in 1980, I thought I knew how to speak in public because I’d been able to stand in front of a classroom twice a week and dissert for three hours at a whack. Balderdash! I knew how to blather. Presenting an effective speech is quite another matter. I became a Toastmasters junkie. At one point I was an officer in three different weekly clubs and I often attended one or two others in addition. Friends made joking references to Twelve-Step programs.

The organization served me well, and I remain a steadfast supporter. Today I seldom give a formal presentation, but I continually give thanks as I write for the practice in quickly finding and framing a message.

I highly recommend Toastmasters for anyone of any age who wants to become a more effective communicator in any mode. You can find a club near you on the Toastmasters website. Check it out. You’ll learn some valuable skills, and probably make some fantastic new friends to boot.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergalfont></font>

Delightful Descriptions

A few days ago Herm posted a comment about the blog That's Not How I Remember It. Herm's concluding descriptions lit my day:

...He sandwiched the meat of laughter between the bread of raised eyebrows. When I finished he simply said, "That's not the way it happened at all."

I rewrote with the flames of my memory and the icicles of his testimony. It melted into something that was reality for both of us.

Wow! Sandwiching the meat of laughter between the bread of raised eyebrows. Flames of memory versus icicles of testimony. Don't those analogies just give your inner writer joyful goosebumps?

Herm is one of my "virtual" writer friends. We met several years ago in the Yahoo Lifestory group. The first story he posted had me sitting on the edge of my chair in admiration. A couple of years ago his story, "Denied the Prize," was published in Chicken Soup for the African American Soul.

Obviously Herm has an innate gift for story telling and depiction. His descriptions sizzle with color and delight his readers. I haven't asked him about this, but I'm assuming he would say it comes naturally to him. If that's the case, perhaps he grew up hearing colorful descriptions as he sat at his grandpa's knee.

Whether you are born with a gift for compelling phraseology or not, it's a skill you can acquire. It's more than a skill; it's a way of thinking and experiencing the world. The first thing you can do to build this skill is to read. Read constantly and pay attention to how authors use description to pull you into the story. Find authors who are particularly good at description and read several of their books. Keep a journal of phrases that especially catch your eye.

The other way to increase your skill is to practice. Think about other ways to say "He frowned," or "Aunt Abbie was huge." Let Aunt Abbie float around your mind until you come up with something like "Aunt Abbie admitted that she quit weighing herself when her scale bottomed out." Or, "Aunt Abbie's upper arm was as big around as my teenage daughter's waist."

Have fun describing your world. Try things out on your family and friends. The world will become more colorful and interesting, in your mind, in your writing and in daily conversations.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

George Orwell and Google

My posting rate has slightly slowed lately due to minor technical problems. I understand that these problems will probably go away if I switch to the new Blogger format, which also gives advantages like the ability to assign categories to each post. Now, how cool will that be, to find all the posts on, say punctuation, with a single click? In another month or so, the choice will no longer be mine. Blogger will switch everyone.

So, why on earth have I dawdled, rather than immediately switching?

Now, that’s a story I’ve never written. It goes back to my junior year in high school when I read George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty Four in English class. This novel made my skin crawl. I grew up in Los Alamos, NM, where nearly every family had at least one member with a Q clearance, the highest security rating at the time (as far as I know), and for much of the time I lived there, security guards limited entrance to the town to residents and invited guests. Perhaps the novel made more of an impact on me for this reason. In any case, it shaped my entire outlook on life.

The year 1984 has long since passed into history without Orwell’s dystopian vision being realized, at least in the Unity States. However, as time has passed and the ubiquity of credit cards, use of Social Security numbers for general identification, availability of all medical records to insurance companies, identity theft, airport security, and so on has grown, my discomfort has escalated. I tend to be, without apology, a personal privacy freak.

Enter Google, the undisputed king of cyber packrats. They never delete anything. I don’t totally boycott Google, but I do prefer search engines like Jux2 or Dogpile that combine results from several search engines. I don’t use Gmail, and I don’t have a Google account.

That last fact, that I don’t have a Google account, is the reason I haven’t switched. Google owns Blogger, and you must have a Google account to use the new Blogger.

Okay, reality check here. Am I going to duck Google forever? Of course not! I love that my blog comes up high on the first page of Google, and I love that Blogger is free of charge and ads are optional. Time to bite the bullet, focus my Attitude of Gratitude, open a Google account, and get with the program. In fact, if I want to go back and assign categories to old messages, I’d better get with the program pronto! The list is growing.

The above explanation doesn’t begin to do justice to my story of the psychic ravages of that novel, but it does give the bare bones. What about you? Did you read that novel? Did it shape your life? Have you written about your views on socio-cultural topics like personal privacy? These matters are at the core of what it means to be an American, a timely topic today that may continue to be of intense interest to your descendants as they consider the same questions.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

P.S. I did it. The change has been made.

That's Not How I Remember It

I recently had a leisurely lunch with a longtime friend, a rare luxury. During the course of the conversation we discovered that our memories of a project we collaborated on over a dozen years ago are as different as night and day. Each of us gives the other credit for instigating the undertaking.

“What a great story,” I replied when I heard the other side. “That’s not how I remember it, but it sounds good.”

“What do you mean? How do you remember it?” My version was like a mirror image.

“No way!” My friend plans to do a journal check to see “how it really happened.”

“I’m eager to hear what your journal says, but if it's different from my account, I’ll remind you that initial perception shapes memory, and we may have perceived it differently to start with. What difference does it make? We’re happy with the outcome, so probably we're both right, or the 'truth' is a combination of our memories.”

I went on to suggest that we each write the story of how this project began so we could post the two stories side-by-side. I doubt that will ever happen, but we had a good laugh, and parted in high spirits.

This isn’t the first time I’ve discovered that friends remember things very differently from the way I remember them. My husband and I have relatively little overlap in our long-term memories in the first place, so there is little conflict between them. We joke that our memories are so different that together we make a whole brain. My sister and I came to the conclusion ages ago that although our parents shared the same name, and we apparently lived at the same address concurrently, we grew up in very different families.

It’s been months since I wrote about the variability of memory. Check The Essence of Truth and A Million Little Pieces for further thoughts on this timely topic. You may also find this information about memory and false memories on Live Science quite fascinating.

Have you had amusing or startling experiences where your memory varied dramatically from someone else’s? How did you handle this? That’s probably worth a story in itself.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

The Importance of Clarity

Last week I read a letter written for the purpose of defending and rallying support for an important cause. The letter is unlikely to achieve that purpose and could even sabotage the effort. Among its flaws, it failed to clearly state the purpose, and supporting evidence for a poorly organized list of complaints was lacking. The effect was somewhat like scattering dots on a piece of paper without adding numbers so they can be connected to reveal a recognizable shape.

I had a sense of déjà vu when I read this letter. It reminds me of stories in my grandmother's autobiography. Her collection of a hundred or so memories consists mainly of disorganized recollections that lack sufficient detail and background information to render them meaningful to anyone who didn't know her well.

My grandmother wrote her autobiography in 1980, not long before she died. It was the first time I'd heard of an "ordinary person" writing an autobiography. I was impressed by the fact that she did it, and treasured it then and now. I've scanned it to save for posterity. Even back then I realized it was missing major chunks of information, and I have added missing pieces I know about - entering my thoughts in italics and initialing them so there will be no confusion about who wrote what.

Recorded memory fragments are not so different from shards of pottery in an archeological dig. The pottery must be cleaned and pieced together insofar as possible to recreate something meaningful, and even a reconstructed pot will shed only so much light on life in that early era. An intact kitchen, such as those found in Pompeii is far more useful.

Whether you are writing a letter of persuasion or a lifestory, you want to achieve the equivalent of that intact kitchen. You'll be more likely to accomplish that aim if you take a few minutes to write a sentence or two explaining the main purpose of your story. Then list the key points required to fully convey the message. You could also jot notes about facts needed to flesh out your main points.

You don't have to make the outline first. If you feel a story ready to gush forth, let it rip. When you finish, make your list to ensure you didn't leave out anything important. You may want to add more content to your story, or take out some distracting trivia. You may want to rearrange parts of it. You may even want to have a few other people, like your writing group, read it to see if it makes sense when read cold.

Never ever skip this step of asking for outside review when you are writing an important letter to generate support. It's an optional step for lifestories. Even though my grandmother's autobiography is scattered and confusing, she did write it, for me, my cousins and our families. I appreciate and honor her effort. In writing persuasive letters, clarity, order and thoroughness are critical. Those attributes are icing on the cake for lifestory writing. Stories that come from your heart, as a gift to the future, are the cake itself.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal